This is rain week here at the Classic Song of the Day blog, and today’s classic rain-themed song of the day is “Rhythm of the Rain” by the Cascades. Released in November of 1962, this single went to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, #2 on the Cash Box Top 100, and #1 on Billboard’s Middle-Road (Easy Listening) chart. Billboard ranked it as the number-three record for all of 1963.
“Rhythm of the Rain” was written by Cascades member John Claude Gummoe. As he relates, he wrote it while he was in the Navy:
“I wrote ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ over a period of time, but the lyrics began while I was serving in the US Navy aboard the USS Jason AR8. I was standing a mid watch on the bridge while we were underway to Japan. We were sailing up in the north pacific and it was raining heavily and the seas were tossing…
“The title came to me first and I liked the ‘ring’ of it, the way it flowed, and that night I wrote down most of the lyrics. It was like the rain was talking. It was later on that I sat down at a piano and was fooling around with the black keys and started playing a sequence from E flat down to F sharp, well, if you do it you’ll see it’s the melody that is now stuck in the heads of millions of people around the world.”
As Gummoe notes, the song’s melody is pretty much step-wise pentatonic—the black keys on a piano. Trust me, pentatonic melodies always work.
BTW, it was the band’s producer, Barry De Vorzon, who came up with the idea of opening the song with the sound of thunder. He enlisted members of the L.A.-based Wrecking Crew for the recording, including Glen Campbell on guitar, Carol Kaye on bass, and Hal Blaine on drums. The result is a record that is instantly memorable and has proven to be timeless.
