‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More . . .’

 by whiteray

Okay, follow the bouncing ball and – if you wish – sing along with this cartoon from 1949:

I recall seeing short features like this – sing-a-longs with the bouncing ball – before movies during the late 1950s and early 1960s.  I’d go – maybe with my pals Rick and Rob or maybe with my sister – to kids’ matinees at the Paramount (or the Eastman or the Hays) here in St. Cloud, and there would be two or three animated features before the main event. 

And I think I saw bouncing ball sing-a-longs on TV on Saturday mornings, watching and trying to keep the volume down on the old Zenith set while my parents slept in. 

Anyway, what caught my ear about this particular sing-a-long when I ran across it at YouTube was the song itself, “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More,” which I’ve heard here and there forever. The video reminded me that a while back, as I was letting the RealPlayer run on random, it offered me Wendell Hall’s version of “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’,” which he recorded for the Victor label in New York City on October 12, 1923. 

I decided to so some digging, and I learned that Hall’s recording was a huge success: It was the No. 1 record in the U.S. in 1924, according to Joel Whitburn’s A Century of Pop Music. But where did the song come from? I dug further. 

The song itself, according to a brief entry at Wikipedia, has been around in various forms since sometime during the 19th Century. Poet and folk musician Carl Sandburg included verses of the song in his 1927 volume American Songbook and suggested, Wikipedia says, that the song had been around since the 1870s. As with almost all folk songs, there are multiple variants, and the verses offered in the cartoon above are not all the same as those recorded by Wendell Hall in October 1923. 

(I should note that the second line of the chorus also has variants. Hall sang, “How in the world can the old folks tell that it ain’t gonna rain no mo’?” The one I recall most clearly, perhaps from Boy Scout camp or Bible camp, went, “Now how in the heck can I wash my neck if it ain’t gonna rain no mo’?”) 

Oddly enough, Wendell Hall’s version of the song is the only one on my digital shelves, even though a cursory search at YouTube turns up numerous versions of the song – old, modern and in between, including a take on the song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. For today, we’ll content ourselves with Hall’s version.

Note: Some readers may find Hall’s vocal style – likely mocking Black language patterns – offensive, and the image on the sheet music shown in the video might also cause offense. All I can say is that the first half of the 20th Century was a far different era than ours, and the popular culture of that time needs to be viewed through a careful lens.