“Come Rain or Come Shine” first appeared in a Broadway musical called St. Louis Woman—a flop. I wonder how many other hit songs came from failed plays or movies. Any list of them would include a disproportionate number of songs by Harold Arlen.

Arlen may be the best songwriter no one ever heard of. During his lifetime, everyone knew his songs. They just didn’t necessarily associate his name with them. He composed music for more than 20 stage productions and 29 films, including The Wizard of Oz. That’s a classic. Not many others saw much success.

Once, when Arlen was riding in a taxi, the driver started whistling “Stormy Weather.” Arlen asked, “Do you know who wrote that?” The cabbie replied that it was by Irving Berlin. When Arlen said it wasn’t Berlin, the cabbie guessed Richard Rogers and Cole Porter. Finally, Arlen said, “I wrote it.” The cabbie asked, “Who are you?”

In 1955, when Arlen had already composed many of his best songs, an American conductor attended a symphony concert in Cairo, Egypt. It ended with a medley of five songs titled “American Folk Music.” Arlen had composed every piece. The American conductor asked the Egyptian conductor if he knew who had written the songs. The Egyptian replied that no one knew. They were all folk tunes. He was flabbergasted to learn that one man, still living, composed all of them.

If Arlen toiled in anonymity during his lifetime, I suppose his name has been all but forgotten by now.

Harold Arlen

Hyman Arluck was born to a Jewish cantor in 1905. He started playing piano at 9 and discovered ragtime and jazz when he was 12. But his sense of improvisation came from listening to his father minister in the synagogue.

The publisher of his first piano piece misprinted his first name as Harold. Hyman liked it. He eventually paired it with a variant of his mother’s maiden name, Orlin.

Arlen usually composed his tunes and then gave them to whomever would write the lyrics. Perhaps for that reason, he seldom stuck with the standard 32-measure song formula. His inventive harmonies often required a few more measures of music to reach their resolution.

Lyricist E.Y. Harburg, one of Arlen’s important collaborators, noted that listeners don’t get tired of an Arlen song. They have universal appeal on first hearing and only get better with time. The non-standard forms show but one aspect of his individuality.

Johnny Mercer

Johnny Mercer, lyricist for “Come Rain or Come Shine,” found his talent for songwriting almost by accident.

He wanted to be an actor and moved from his home town of Savannah, Georgia to New York. He wrote the song he sang for one of his first auditions. The producers loved the song and put it in the show. But not Mercer.

Mercer eventually contributed lyrics to more than 1,500 songs. Unlike Arlen, he became well known. Not only that, but other songwriters regarded him as the standard of excellence.

He and Arlen wrote their first songs together in the 1930s, but most of their collaboration occurred during the Second World War. Their work on soon-forgotten movies includes such hits as “Blues in the Night,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “Accentuate the Positive.”

St. Louis Woman

Arlen and Harburg won the Academy Award for the best song in 1939 for “Over the Rainbow.” Their Broadway musical Bloomer Girl started its long run in 1944.

Based on that success, Arlen was asked to provide music for St. Louis Woman in 1946. The producer asked Mercer, not Harburg, to provide the lyrics. Mercer, unfortunately, had no concept of how to combine songs into a dramatic whole.

St. Louis Woman had more serious problems than that. It was based on a novel by black novelist Arna Bontemps. Bontemps and black poet Countee Cullen had adapted the novel for straight theater. The musical version was supposed to feature an all-black cast, led by Lena Horne. It should have been a pathbreaking project.

The NAACP denounced it for using demeaning racial stereotypes. Horne eventually withdrew from the project, declaring that the story “sets the Negro race back one hundred years.”

The show marked Pearl Bailey’s Broadway debut. She won the Donaldson Award for the best female debut in a musical. The musical itself, however, ran for only 113 performances.

Come Rain or Come Shine

A songwriter usually works with a text and writes the music to it. Arlen didn’t work that way. He wrote his tunes and expected the lyricist to write words to fit them.

The tune for “Come Rain or Come Shine” consists mostly of a single note repeated many times. Like the equally repetitive slow movement in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, it avoids becoming boring by the inventiveness of the underlying harmony.

Mercer may not have had great dramatic gifts, but he certainly knew how to capture the mood of a tune. He discerned that he needed to find a simple way of saying “I love you,” something a man in a bar might say to a woman he just met.

He suggested the opening, “I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you . . .” and Arlen quipped, “come hell or high water.” Mercer laughed and substituted a variant of a line he’d used before. “Come shower or shine” became “come rain or come shine.”

Since the tune relied so much on repeating a single note, Mercer was stingy with rhyme.

Critics now consider St. Louis Woman the Arlen/Mercer team’s best score, but only one song became an independent hit. “Come Rain or Come Shine” enjoyed modest success at first. Margaret Whiting’s recording rose to no. 17 on the Billboard chart.

Whiting later remembered them as “the most unlikely, wonderful team. Johnnny was a true son of the South and Harold Arlen a true son of a cantor from Buffalo. But these two disparate heritages meshed.”

Her father, songwriter Richard Whiting, had taught her that songwriters worked hard to get songs just right. So she should always sing them exactly as written. But in the recording studio,

Something happened in my mind. I started thinking about Harold, the cantor’s son. On that last note, I just let it wail: “I’m gonna love you, com ra-in or shi-i-i––ne.” Well, Johnny just burst through the door, mad as hell: “What in God’s name are you doing?” He was followed by Harold, who shouted, “No, leave it, leave it. That’s the way I should have written it.”

After Whiting introduced the song, many other important singers sang it. Ray Charles first showed how a male singer could handle this song. Frank Sinatra later made it his own and sang it on almost every performance for about thirty years.

Sources:
America’s Songs / by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (2006)
Come Rain or Come Shine (1946) / Jazz Standards.com
Did he write that? America’s great unknown songwriter Harold Arlen / Frank Ferriano, Soundscapes. November 2000
Johnny Mercer / Lydia Hutchinson, Performing Songwriter. November 18, 2017

Photo credits:
Cloudy sky. Some rights reserved by Pixabay.
Harold Arlen. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Johnny Mercer. Photo by William P. Gottlieb. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Come Rain or Come Shine cover. Source unknown.
Margeret Whiting. Photo by William P. Gottlieb. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons