It's Raining, It's Pouring
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| "It's Raining, It's Pouring" | |
|---|---|
| Nursery rhyme | |
| Recorded | 1939 |
"It's Raining, It's Pouring" is an English language nursery rhyme and children's song, seemingly of American origin but later found in the UK. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 16814.[1]
US versions
The first two lines of the rhyme are found near the start of the 1900s. They appear in a 1909 number of the Princeton University magazine The Outlook as "It's raining - it's pouring - old men are snoring".[2] Then in 1912 the rhyme was recorded in the collection The Little Mother Goose in the form of a couplet,
- It's raining, it's pouring,
- The old man is snoring.[3]
The earliest known audio recording of the song was made in 1939 in New York by anthropologist and folklorist Herbert Halpert and is held in the Library of Congress.[4] A musical version of it was copyrighted in 1944 by Freda Selicoff.[5] The melody is the same as "A Tisket, A Tasket" and has been associated with "What Are Little Boys Made Of?",[6] which has a different melody. By this time two more lines had been added about the old man snoring:
- He went to bed and bumped his head,
- And couldn't get up in the morning.
A later suggestion has been that that the verse is a "classic description" of a head injury ("bumped his head"), followed by a lucid interval and an inability to resume normal activity ("couldn't get up in the morning").[7] Andrew Kaye in Essential Neurosurgery suggested that the rhyme is an interpretation of an accidental death.[7]
UK versions
Peter and Iona Opie later recorded instances of the rhyme in the UK. It appears in a notebook from 1952 as occurring in Wales[8] and was later mentioned in their 1959 book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Another such collection records the rhyme as current in Coventry during the 1970s[9] while an earlier wartime parody beginning "It's raining, it's pouring, and Hitler said to Goering," is mentioned in an entry in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.[10]
References
- ↑ "English Folk Dance and Song Society: The National Organisation for the Development of the Folk Arts". Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
- ↑ The Outlook, Vol. 93, pp. 696, 698
- ↑ The Little Mother Goose (1912, Dodd, Mead & Company, 3rd edn., 1918), p. 169.
- ↑ "It's raining, it's pouring". Library of Congress. 24 October 1939. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
- ↑ Catalog of Copyright Entries: Musical compositions. Library of Congress, Copyright Office. 1944. p. 1362.
- ↑ Hayes, Bruce P.; MacEachern, Margaret (1998). "Quatrain Form in English Folk Verse". Language. 74 (3): 480–481. doi:10.2307/417791. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 417791. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
Our folk song database includes no instances of the parallel long-last construction GG4G, but we know of three of them from our childhoods. Ex: [What are little boys made of] is one (The others are 'It's Raining, It's Pouring' and 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket, A Green and Yellow Basket')
- 1 2 Kaye, Andrew H. (2009). Essential Neurosurgery. John Wiley & Sons. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-4051-4817-7.
- ↑ Opie Archive
- ↑ Steve Roud, The Lore of the Playground, p.422
- ↑ Library Archive