"It's Raining, It's Pouring"
Nursery rhyme
Recorded1939

"It's Raining, It's Pouring" is an English language nursery rhyme and children's song. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 16814.[1]

Origins

The first two lines of this rhyme can be found in The Little Mother Goose, published in the US in 1912.[2] The melody is associated with "A Tisket, A Tasket" and "What Are Little Boys Made Of?"[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] Charles Ives added musical notes 1939, and a version of it was copyrighted in 1944 by Freda Selicoff.[5][6]

The poem goes as follows:[7]

It's raining, it's pouring,
The old man is snoring,
He went to bed and bumped his head,
And couldn't get up in the morning.

Interpretation

It has been suggested 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, in regard to the first verse at least, the rhyme is an interpretation of an accidental death.[7]

References

  1. ↑ "English Folk Dance and Song Society: The National Organisation for the Development of the Folk Arts". Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
  2. ↑ Anon, The Little Mother Goose (1912, Dodd, Mead & Company, 3rd edn., 1918), p. 169.
  3. ↑ 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')
  4. ↑ "It's raining, it's pouring". Library of Congress. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
  5. ↑ Henderson, C. W. (2008). The Charles Ives Tunebook. Indiana University Press. p. 141.
  6. ↑ Catalog of Copyright Entries: Musical compositions. Library of Congress, Copyright Office. 1944. p. 1362. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
  7. 1 2 3 Kaye, Andrew H. (2009). Essential Neurosurgery. John Wiley & Sons. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-4051-4817-7. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
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