A Summer Night’s Rain
(Bob Nolan)
Loneliness is just that I need someone.
The desert flowers, they need someone, too.
The thirsty earth invites the summer raindrop.
Through this lonely night I wait for you.
Far o’er the plains, the summer night rains
Fall soft as twilight dew.
Come from on high where sad angels cry.
I guess they’re lonesome, too.
Low in the sky comes a trail of gray,
Breathing a sigh to the newborn day
While it rains to comfort the plains down here,
But where are you?
While it rains to comfort the plains down here,
But where are you?
A Summer Night's Rain
began its life as a poem and,
in answer to the growing demand for more and more songs, Bob wrote music for it.
The result is a song as gentle as a soft rain in a hot and thirsty land.
A Summer Night's Rain
is also a prime example of how one of Bob's verses was changed slightly to suit
the listening public. In the last two lines of his original song, he concluded
with:
...While it rains to comfort the plains down here
But where are you?
Because of the inadequacies of radio at the time, listeners heard it this way:
While it rains to comfort the plains.
Dawn's here, but where are you?
Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers bowed to the inevitable, as they did with Cool Water or Tumbling Tumbleweeds, and changed the lyric to what the listener thought he heard. The original verse is never used now. In the rendition of A Summer Night's Rain you are listening to as you read this page, Ken Curtis sings it as Bob had intended it to be sung and how it was published as sheet music in Songs of the Pioneers Folio No. 2, © 1936 by AMERICAN MUSIC, INC.
Examples:
•
A
Summer Night's Rain
by Ken Curtis, just as Bob Nolan
wrote it.
•
A
Summer Night's Rain recorded
for the Standard Radio Transcriptions in September, 1935, with solo by Leonard
Slye (Roy Rogers), Bob sings the verse.
• A Summer Night's Rain from "The Songs of Bob Nolan" LPM/LSP 3554, 1966 with solo by Dale Warren.
