"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" (1933), "Ill Wind" (1934), "Over the Rainbow" (1939), "When the Sun Comes Out" (1941), and "I Never Has Seen Snow" (1954).[2]
Chart performance
The song "became a modest hit during the show's run, making the pop charts with a Margaret Whiting (Paul Weston and His Orchestra) recording rising to number seventeen, and, shortly after, a Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes recording rising to number twenty-three."[1]
Structure
"Come Rain or Come Shine" begins most unusually: As Ted Gioia notes, "Arlen delivers the same note—flogging an A natural until it is bloody—13 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."[3]
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."[4]
Legacy
The song has gone on to become a major jazz standard, covered many hundreds of times.[5] As Gioia notes, "Given the paucity of melodic material and the richness of the harmonic underpinnings, the composition tends to resist grandstanding, and instead appeals to the more introspective improviser. Recordings by Bill Evans, Stan Getz, and Ralph Towner testify to the pastoral qualities of Arlen's tune."[6]
