Come Rain or Come Shine
"Come Rain or Come Shine" is a popular music song and jazz standard with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. It was written for the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman, which opened on March 30, 1946, and closed after 113 performances. The show also produced another notable standard, "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home."
"Come Rain or Come Shine" is one in a series of enduring songs with meteorological themes that Arlen composed through the course of his career, including "Stormy Weather", "Ill Wind", "Over the Rainbow", "When the Sun Comes Out", and "I Never Has Seen Snow".
Chart performance
The song "became a modest hit during the show's run, making the pop charts with a Margaret Whiting recording rising to number seventeen, and, shortly after, a Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes recording rising to number twenty-three."Structure
"Come Rain or Come Shine" begins most unusually: As Ted Gioia notes, "Arlen delivers the same noteflogging an A natural until it is bloody13 times in a row.... And, as if that isn't enough, he tosses out a half-dozen more of the same note in bar five, and another six over the next two bars. This isn't a melody; it's a musical starvation diet."Nonetheless, as Alec Wilder observes, this "superb ballad... could never be so great unless the device of those repeated notes were the principal single element in the melody. The second section is without them, providing an essential contrast.... The whole last half of the song builds inexorably to the final f natural." He also notes that the song's harmony "is opulent throughout."