Posted on by Dick

Did you know it's raining? No but if you could hum a few bars …

 The rain continues, on and off, here in the upper corner of the Texas Gulf Coast. It’s been like this for a couple of days. The weather people say we’ve got ourselves a:

COMPLEX WEATHER SITUATION WITH A COASTAL SURFACE TROUGH/WARM FRONT LOCATED OFF THE SOUTHEAST TEXAS AND SOUTHERN LOUISIANA COAST.

 I’m sure that it’s a heck of a lot more complicated than that, but it’s good enough for me. The local weather folks out of the NWS Lake Charles office say that any tropical formation “seems unlikely at this time” and the National Hurricane Center gives this system less than a 30 percent chance for any type of cyclonic activity. But having slept through Hurricane Humberto, which formed two years ago tomorrow, I can tell you that these pesky little systems which stick around in the Gulf and build can jump up quicker than a jackrabbit with a firecracker up its wazoo and commence to giving objects ashore a senseless thrashing.

 So hopefully this — system — will just be a rain event. And in such event, one needs a little background music. For that, I found this Web page compiled by a person with even more time on his hands than I have. He has put together a list of rain-related songs. I will show some he listed a few of mine too, in no particular order, and then you can look at his page and go wild. Stay dry.

A few rain songs: From the “Rain Songs” blog and a few off he top of my head.

  1. Rainy Night in Georgia — Brook Benton
  2. Let it Rain — Derek and the Dominoes (Eric Clapton)
  3. Rainy Night House — Joni Mitchell
  4. It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ — Folk song
  5. I Can See Clearly Now (the rain is gone) — Johnny Nash
  6. Blue Eyes Cryin’ In the Rain — Willie Nelson
  7. Fire and Rain — James Taylor
  8. Candles in the Rain (Lay Down) — Melanie (Safka)
  9. Raining in My Heart — Slim Harpo
  10. Thunder Island (about being caught in the rain while … ) — Jay Ferguson
  11. Have You Ever Seen the Rain? — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  12. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall — Bob Dylan (not the kind of rain you’d want)
  13. Here Comes the Rain Again — The Eurythmics
  14. Rainy Day Woman — Waylon Jennings
  15. Who’ll Stop the Rain? — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  16. Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 — Bob Dylan
  17. Texas Flood — Stevie Ray Vaughn
  18. Louisiana 1927 — Randy Newman
  19. When the Levee  Breaks — Led Zepplin
  20. It Never Rains in Southern California — Albert Hammond

Of course, there are tons and tons of rain songs. It would seem people write almost as many songs about rain as they write about love. And of course there are those songs which have to do about loving in the rain (“Thunder Island”) and loving the rain (“I Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbit, which is not listed above because I don’t particularly like the song.) I am not a big fan of No. 20, about it never raining in So. Cal. either. I listed it because I was sitting somewhere to avoid a August 1977 rainstorm in San Diego where I heard on the TV playing there that Elvis had died. I thought about the irony of the Albert Hammond song and it raining like hell as I found out the King was dead. Oh, and there’s Elvis’s “Kentucky Rain.” It was an okay song, but I liked his much older stuff better.

 Oh well. Here is music to drown by. Just don’t drown.