Reflections on “Didn’t It Rain” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe

The first version I heard of this song was by Hugh Laurie. All of the stuff in this post is stuff I could hear, so it won’t be a complete analysis, but it’ll have some type of analysis.

Harmony

There aren’t a ton of different chords. It mostly focuses on I7, IV7, and V7 with some other stuff added in there as passing chords.

One thing I really like about the blues is that it uses passing chords a whole lot. Groups of notes (chords) aren’t just sat on, but they’re also used as a way to make a melody. You can hear this at the beginning and end of the song. At the beginning right after the short guitar riff there’s a series of descending chords played in passing. They have a “function”, but the main function is to descend down to the I7 chord. The same idea is played at the end of the song.

Texture

I really like the texture in this song. It’s really busy, but I like how busy it is. During the verses (around 0:34) when Sister Rosetta Tharpe is singing “it rained forty days. It rained forty nights. There was no land nowhere in sight”, she’s also playing these chromatic and pentatonic lines on the guitar almost as if it’s a guitar solo. It creates this interesting type of counterpoint where these two lines both work over the harmony, yet they may not have been super carefully thought out to be played together. I really like that type of counterpoint as opposed to some of the counterpoint in older classical music. I like the sort of chaotic sound it creates.

The same type of counterpoint can be heard (around 0:57) in what I’d call the pre-chorus. There are two voices together along with the piano now playing some type of lines over the harmony.

This contrasting with almost all of the instruments playing the same rhythm at the beginning of the chorus (around 1:06) where Sister Rosetta Tharpe sings “didn’t it rain, rain, rain children” makes it more interesting. You then have these two different ideas in the song. The first idea is different lines and different rhythms creating a busier and more chaotic sound. The second being this very uniform and similar rhythm with everyone playing together.

It almost becomes a type of tension and release because it gets more chaotic with the two voices right before the chorus. Then when the chorus starts all the instruments come together to play the same thing. So the chaos and busy-ness of the previous texture is resolved in the chorus.

Form

The form of the song sounds like this:

Intro – Chorus – Verse – Pre-chorus – Chorus – Solo/Bridge – Chorus – Verse – Pre-chorus – Chorus

We could also shorten it to be this:

I – C – V – PC – C – B – C – V – PC – C

Another interesting thing this song has is that it’s got a call and response in it. That basically means you have two different voices or instruments playing off of each other. It ends up sounding like a musical conversation.

In the chorus we have these lyrics that almost form a conversation:

Voice 1: “Didn’t it?”

Voice 2: “Yes.”

Voice 1: “Didn’t it?”

Voice 2: “You know it did.”

Voice 1: “Didn’t it?”

Voice 1 and 2 together: “Oh oh my lord didn’t it rain.”

So this conversation is back and forth and ends with both of those voices singing together.

Melody

The melody for this song is pretty clear because there’s a singer. It can get a little harder to distinguish the melody later because there’s multiple singers, but for the most part there’s a clear melody.

One thing to notice when listening to blues and jazz is improvisation. If we listen to two different choruses, they aren’t entirely identical. Sometimes one of the singers sings a little higher than the last time. Sometimes the rhythm is changed a little bit, but it’s still mostly the same melodic shape.

This is probably most obvious in the “conversation” or call and response that we went through earlier. The call stays the same. The words, melody, and rhythm all stay the same every time we hear it throughout the song. But the responses change. The words are always the same, but sometimes the exact notes change and sometimes the rhythm is extended or stretched out.

The final response of “oh oh my lord didn’t it rain”, always stays the same. Again this helps resolve some tension created by the call and response.

Rhythm/Meter

The song stays pretty consistently in 4/4 the entire song. There’s a constant drumbeat throughout the song keeping time.

In the chorus when the singers come together to sing “oh oh my lord didn’t it rain”, there’s almost a polyrhythm played. for a few beats there’s a 3 over 2 polyrhythm because the rhythm of those words accent some off beats. We can visualize this.

1—&—2—&—3—&—4—&—1—&—2—&—3—&—4—&—1

oh            oh             my            lord             didn’t it         rain

So the melody and instruments are accenting every three 8th notes which in a duple meter like 4/4 creates a polyrhythm of 3 over 2. It doesn’t last very long and is resolved by accenting the last few beats of the measure and ending heavily on the downbeat, resolving the tension created by that polyrhythm. This makes it sound like the end of that call and response is almost jumping to the end.

That’s all I’ve got from listening to that song. It does take a few listens to really figure all that stuff out, but it’s got lots of interesting musical ideas in it.

ISJ