"Come Rain or Come Shine": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Come Rain or Come Shine"

Other songs written for the show St. Louis Woman currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook:

St. Louis Woman opened on Broadway on March 30, 1946 and closed July 6, 1946: music by Harold Arlen; lyrics by Johnny Mercer; book by Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen; directed by Rouben Mamoulian; based on the novel God Sends Sunday by Arna Bontemps. The original cast included Robert Pope (Badfoot), Harold Nicholas (Little Augie), Fayard Nicholas (Barney), June Hawkins (Lilli), Pearl Bailey (Butterfly), Ruby Hill (Della Green), Rex Ingram (Biglow Brown), and Milton J. Williams. (for more information about the show see Wikipedia article.)

"Come Rain or Come Shine" was introduced in St. Louis Woman by Ruby Hill and Harold Nicholas playing Della Green and Li'l Augie.

Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, New York: Random House, 2007 (paperback edition, 2008)

Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters (originally published 1973 as They're Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim—The Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations), New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008.

Composers and lyricists have said many things about the nature of their collaborations. Harold Arlen told Max Wilk that with Ted Koehler, one of his first lyricists ("I've Got the World on a String," "Stormy Weather," "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" etc.), "you had to sit at the piano and play for days and days. Sometimes all night." He commented about Leo Robin, with whom he wrote "Hooray for Love" and "For Every Man There's a Woman," "He's never sure. He tightens up. Comes back and hands you a lyric." Arlen claimed that Robin would make all kinds of excuses for his work, even though it was often the very lyric that would finally be used. And as for Ira Gershwin, he "tightens up before he starts. He seems to hate writing ballads. Absolutely loathes them. And he's the guy who wrote 'Love Walked In' and 'They Can't Take That Away from Me' and 'Embraceable You'" (Wilk pp. 161-162).

With Johnny Mercer, Arlen wrote many great standards: "Blues in the Night," "My Shining Hour," "That Old Black Magic," "Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home," just to mention a few. When Wilk asked Arlen about Mercer, Arlen threw up his hands and said, "You trust him. That's all. You have faith. He takes your melody away and comes back with the words" (Wilk, p. 162). Apparently it didn't play out exactly that way with "Come Rain or Come Shine." Shortly after Arlen and Mercer signed on to write the score for the Broadway production, St. Louis Woman, Mercer, who had just finished collaborating with Harry Warren on MGM's The Harvey Girls, dropped by Arlen's Beverly Hills home. In Gene Lee's account:

Arlen played a little figure for him, a repeated note dropping a major third, then rising a minor third. It had something of a recitativo quality to it, and it elicited a phrase from John: 'I'm gonna love you like nobody's loved you. . . .' To which Arlen, always a witty man said, "Come hell or high water." "Of Course," John said, laughing. "Come rain or come shine" ( Lees, p. 236 ) .

Philip Furia points out that Mercer had probably drawn upon his "fertile subconscious memory" having previously used a similar phrase, "come shower or shine," in another lyric, the one for "Dearly Beloved," which he wrote with Jerome Kern in 1942. Furia goes on to note that "for the more earthy sound of Arlen's melody Mercer fastened upon the the more colloquial 'come rain or come shine'" (Furia, Skylark, p. 161).

St. Louis Woman, the Broadway show for which "Come Rain or Come Shine" was written, was not a success. Alec Wilder in his classic book American popular song writes, "I was lucky enough to see a performance of St. Louis Woman in 1946. It was one of the loveliest musicals I've ever seen--costumes, scenery, lyrics and music. An it failed. Why, I shall never know" (Wilder, p. 282). The show featured, along with the Arlen-Mercer score, a book by the distinguished Harlem Renaissance writers Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen, an all Black cast including Ruby Hill, Rex Ingram, the wonderful dance team of The Nicholas Brothers, and Pearl Bailey, who won best newcomer of the year, in a supporting, but important role. Many reasons have been cited for its failure (It closed after 113 performances.). Lena Horne, after being pressured by the NCAA, refused to play the lead because of what they and eventually she felt were the show's negative stereotypes about African American life. Many felt the book was weak. And there was the recurring phenomenon of Mercer's apparent inability to write lyrics that integrated well into a storyline, a characteristic that dogged him throughout his career as a lyricist for Broadway. As Wilfred Sheed put it, "Mercer's songs were private worlds, complete unto themselves, and they never seemed comfortable as parts of plays" (Sheed, p. 265). After the example of Oklahoma in 1943, songs pretty much had to function as parts of the plot, not as stand alone entertainments. Nevertheless, the score for St. Louis Woman, separate from the show, was and remains highly regarded. Along with "Come Rain or Come Shine," the score contained one other song that has become a Standard, "Anyplace I Hang My Hat is Home."

Two early recordings of "Come Rain or Come Shine" made the charts in 1946. One by Margaret Whiting reached number 17 on June, 15, and the other by Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes got to number twenty-three on July, 6 (Whitburn, pp. 454, 163). Mercer (a founder of Capitol Records), banking on "Come Rain or Come Shine" becoming the big hit of what he hoped would be a hit show, arranged for Margaret Whiting to record it for Capitol before the show opened. Whiting, who was the daughter of the late Richard Whiting with whom Mercer had collaborated on songs like "Too Marvelous for Words" and "Hooray for Hollywood" recalls that both Arlen and Mercer were present in the control room of the studio while she was making the recording. Furia quotes her reflections on the songwriting pair:

One of the ways Harold did write it was to incorporate a series of repeated notes in the first two measures of the song. Alex Wilder had, in his own word "pontificated" that Arlen was not given to using repeated notes but then acknowledges,

David Lehman also points out Arlen's use of repeated notes but to a different end. He sees the music of "Come Rain or Come Shine" with "its unsettled tonality, going back and forth between major and minor keys, and it's emphatic use of repeated notes" as characteristic of "Jewish music," prompting Mercer, the non-Jewish member of this writing team, to write "a Jewish lyric—to write against the grain of his assertions" (Lehman, p. 85). Lehman explains the contradictions that constitute a subtext in Mercer's words:

This musically demanding song makes "I Love You" sound real though shot through with anxiety: There is resolve here, and sincerity . . . but there is little euphoria or jubilation. What is affirmed is a love greater than circumstance, and what it implies is that the circumstances don't look good. The song offers a quotation from Cole Porter . When we started our romance we thought " it was just one of those things ." But—the song keeps saying "but"— this is for always. There is skepticism to overcome, and consequently equivocation here as well as affirmation . . . "We're in or we're out of the money" [which as Lehman points out is an allusion to Al Dubin 's lyric in his and Harry Warren 's " The Gold Diggers' Song "]. (To read the lyric in a separate window, click here .)

Finally, the lyric, from Lehman's point-of-view, is also contradictory with regard to the social context of its time. Whereas Dubin and Warren wrote their song in the heart of the Depression (for Gold Diggers of 1933), their work is unequivocally positive. Ginger Rogers and her chorus (who sing it in the movie) have no doubt that they will over come all adversity in a particularly adverse time. Arlen and Mercer, writing in 1946 after the Depression is over and America has won the war, reveal the uncertainty that remains within the realm of private lives, even in the midst of circumstances that look pretty good. (Lehman, pp.. 85-86).

One of the criteria for calling a song an American Standard is its persistent inclusion in the repertoire of singers and musicians over the generations. As many as 102 albums of vocals contain "Come Rain or Come Shine." Artists on this list range from Ruby Hill in the original cast album of St. Louis Woman to Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Lamott and scores of others. Jazz instrumental versions include recordings by artists such as Clifford Brown, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and Bill Evans. A Rufus Wainwright concert recording and a B. B. King /Eric Clapton duet are among some contemporary versions.

At the very top of the iTunes list, however, is the 1959 Ray Charles version arranged by Frank Burns, a recording that became one of Charles' trademark songs and a classic version of "Come Rain or Come Shine." As Chris Ingham points out it certainly influenced the 1961 Sinatra recording arranged by Don Costa (the first Sinatra/Costa collaboration). Ingham states, "With Costa's dramatic and musical skills and the force of Sinatra's personality a whole new masterpiece was created; Costa conjures up an intoxicating mixture of barroom blues, concert hall strings and fresh modern harmonies and Sinatra delivers a forceful vocal with a hint of R&B holler" (Ingham, pp. 261-2).

In a performance early in his career, Tony Bennett introduced "Come Rain or Come Shine," saying, "Here's a song by my very favorite composer" (Harold Arlen Documentary film), and in 1985, Frank Sinatra during a concert in Japan declared before singing "Come Rain or Come Shine," "I like this song almost more than any song I've ever sung."

Click here to read the lyrics, as sung by Ray Charles, to "Come Rain or Come Shine." Click here to listen to Michael Feinstein's account of how the title of "Come Rain or Come Shine" came about.

• Maxine Sullivan: direfranchement
• Frank Sinatra, Colgate Comedy Hour: I Want Moore Retro
• Frank Sinatra, 1961 track from Sinatra and Strings: Globalnewsflash Bettathanyou
  
• Frank Sinatra, Live, 1982: Simone Maibon
• Frank Sinatra/Gloria Estevan: GloriaEstefanMusic
• Billie Holiday: RoundMidnightTV
• Rosemary Clooney: dorcm1973
• Judy Garland: MichelBell1
• Nancy Lamott: nar5038
• B. B. King and Eric Clapton: alaskavy
• Mary J. Blige: FunksUTube;
• Barbra Streisand: Pbrinco
• Rufus Wainwright: EBORIZO
• Willie Nelson: mirellediscretL
• Nora Jones and Wynton Marsalis: MeEle

Notes

• 1. Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home
• 2. I Had Myself a True Love
• 3. I Wonder What Became of Me (cut from show)
• About the Show St. Louis Woman
• Philip Furia, Skylark The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer , New York: St. Martins Press, 2003
• Edward Jablonski Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows, and Blues , Boston: Northeaster UP, 1996 (paper bound ed. 1998 shown).
• David Lehman. A Fine Romance Jewish Songwriters, American Songs . New York: Next Book/Schocken, 2009.
• Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music , 1986
• Alec Wilder, American Popular Song The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 , New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
• Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Harold Arlen , Documentary Film (DVD) Director/Producer Don McGlynn, 1999.
• The complete, authoritative lyrics for "Come Rain or Come Shine" can be found in:

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