Rain on the Roof

DESCRIPTION: "When the humid shadows hover Over all the starry spheres And the melancholy darkness Gently weeps in rainy tears, What a bliss to press the pillow Of a cottage-chamber bed, And to listen to the patter Of the soft rain overhead!' No sound is more pleasant
AUTHOR: Coates Kinney (1826-1904) (source: Wikipedia; Granger's Index to Poetry)
EARLIEST DATE: 1865 (Dime-Song-Book #16)
KEYWORDS: nonballad storm
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Dime-Song-Book #16, pp. 10-11, "The Rain on the Roof" (1 text)
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, pp. 118-119, "The Melody of Rain" (1 text) (p. 99 in the 1919 edition)
Roud #14087
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Darling Nelly Gray" (tune)
NOTES [93 words]: Coates Kinney was a lawyer, journalist, and paymaster in the Union army in the Civil War; he also had a minor career in Ohio politics. He also published two volumes of poetry -- but this seems to be the only thing he wrote that anyone remembers; Wikipedia (which has a short entry on Kinney) calls it his most popular poem, and it is the only one indexed in Granger's Index to Poetry. Wikipedia says it was set to music, but does not say by whom. Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania says there are two tunes, one of which is "Darling Nelly Gray." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: Shoe118

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