Rain, Rain, Go Away: A Song History
"Rain, Rain, Go Away" is a children's rhyme addressed to the rain, catalogued as Roud 19096 and found in many forms, some of which send the rain off to Spain.[1] The Ballad Index identifies probable ancestors in seventeenth-century texts given by Howell in 1659 and by Aubrey in 1687.[1] James Orchard Halliwell, writing in 1849, quoted a rain-to-Spain couplet from Howell's Proverbs of 1659, along with a manuscript note by Aubrey on the custom of children joining together "to sing or charme away the raine."[2] Aubrey's children asked the rain to return on Saturday, and Halliwell also printed a version that promises the rain a figgy cake, which he explained as the Devonshire name for a plum cake.[2]
David Lucas after John Constable, Summer Afternoon - after a Shower, from Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery, mezzotint, 1831. English countryside as a shower clears, shown for the rhyme's subject; it has no connection to the rhyme.
Halliwell had already printed the familiar "go away" form, with no mention of Spain, in the second edition of his The Nursery Rhymes of England (1843), where a third line names a little boy, Arthur, who wants to play.[3] Later collections keep turning it up: Iona and Peter Opie gave ten texts in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, and the Ballad Index also cites texts in a book of Ulster childhood songs and sayings and in a study of Cornish folklore.[1] Mike Anderson, who taught kindergarten for decades, includes it in DAD tuning in Songs For Kids, a Fingers Of Steel book of easy mountain dulcimer arrangements of children's favorites.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index (Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle): "Rain, Rain, Go Away".
- Internet Archive: "James Orchard Halliwell, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849)".
- Internet Archive: "James Orchard Halliwell, The Nursery Rhymes of England, second edition (1843)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Mike Anderson, Songs For Kids".
- Image: David Lucas after John Constable, Summer Afternoon - after a Shower, from Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery, mezzotint, 1831. The Cleveland Museum of Art.