Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories
300 traditional songs, inc sheet music with full piano accompaniment & lyrics.
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58 0UR: FAMILIAR SONGS.
RAIN ON THE ROOF.
Coatks Kinney, author of "Rain on the Roof," was bora in Y-.tes County, N. Y. November 24,1826. He obtained a liberal education, and has been a teacher, an editor, and a lawyer. During the war, he was a paymaster in the national army, and at its close he left the service with the brevet of lieutenant-colonel. He was editor and proprietor of the Xenia, 0., Torchlight, in l865-'7, and editor-in-chief of the Cincinnati Times in 1868, and is DOW practicing law in Xenia. He has published a small volume of poems.
Mr. Kinney gives this account of the origin of the song: "The verses were written when I was about twenty years of age, as nearly as I can remember. They were inspired dose to the rafters of a little story-and-a-half frame house. The language, as first published, was not composed,—it came. I had just a little more to do with it than I had with the coming of the rain. The poem, in its entirety, came and asked me to put it down, the next afternoon, in the course of a solitary and aimless squandering of a young man's precious time along a no-whither road through a summer wood. Every word of it is a fact, and was a tremendous heart-throb."
The verses were sent to Emerson Bennett, at that time editor of The Columbian, a, Cincinnati, who threw them aside, as not being quite up to the Columbian's standard! A few days later, the publisher of the paper, Mr. Penrose Jones, rummaging in the drawers of rejected manuscripts, came across Mr. Kinney's, and, holding it up, wanted to know " What the dickens do you mean, Mr. Bennett, by putting this in here!" The next day it went into print in the Columbian, and immediately afterward, to the surprise and disgust of Mr. Bennett, it went all over the world. These words have been set to music by various composers. We give here the version of James G. Clark. |
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