Thunder In The Morning

 by whiteray

As I pondered the topic of my post this morning, I glanced out the window near my desk. The sky had gone from a dim grey to a near black. So, I clicked the weather icon on my screen, and the radar told me that we had a thunderstorm moving in from the west. 

About five minutes later, the thunder came, and a few minutes after that, the lights and my screen flickered and went dark for an instant. Then, just as the lights came back, the rain arrived, accompanied not long after by five minutes of marble-sized hail. And as I waited for my computer to boot up again, I wondered how many mp3s I have in my day-to-day collection – they total somewhere north of 88,000 – that have the word “thunder” in their titles? 

The answer, it turns out, is thirty-two. About half of those are renditions of “Thunder Road,” most by Bruce Springsteen with and without the E Street Band along with some covers. Some of the rest are “You’ll Love The Thunder” by Jackson Browne, “Thunder In The Afternoon” by Bobbie Gentry, “Thunder Island” by Jay Ferguson, just plain “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons, “Thunder and Lightning” by Chi Coltrane, and “The Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks. 

(The sorting mechanism on the RealPlayer finds every track that has the search word in either its title, artist name or album name, so I had to ignore several versions of the theme from the 1965 James Bond film “Thunderball” as well as about 182 tracks from a collection of music from NFL Films titled Autumn Thunder. Also going by the wayside was the title track from Scott Fitzgerald’s new age-y 1990 album, Thunderdrums.) 

And now that the thunder and the rain have passed beyond us to the east, I’m trying to sort out which “thunder” song I should drop in here. I love Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” (it’s a favorite shower choice), but the song, of course, isn’t about thunder at all. And as I look at the list of tunes in the earlier paragraph, I’m trying to choose between three of them, the Jackson Browne, the Bobby Gentry, and the Chi Coltrane. 

The Browne track was on his 1978 live album Running On Empty. It wasn’t released as a single but it’s plenty familiar, as the album spent two weeks at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. The Coltrane track was released as a single and went to No. 17 on the Hot 100 in the autumn of 1972. 

The Gentry track, on the other hand, has had limited distribution. A cover of a 1977 Mac Davis release, it showed up – according to a 2017 note by one poster at YouTube – on an Australian Gentry anthology and evidently nowhere else. It’s thought to be one of several tracks Gentry recorded in 1978 with renowned producer Rick Hall. 

And it’s a pretty good piece of work: