It Rains Everywhere I Go

By Don Cusic

Sometimes, it takes a while for a song to find the perfect home. “It Rains Everywhere I Go,” written by Don Cusic in the late 1970s, didn’t find its just-right singer for more than two decades. Ultimately, the song was released on Lynn Morris’s Mama’s Hand in1995 by Rounder Records, and Rounder later included it as part of its groundbreaking O Sister, Where Art Thou? project, which sold upwards of 150,000 copies. 

A signature song for Morris, “It Rains” has become a bluegrass radio classic that is also performed on stages and in backstage jams the world over. “It’s funny how songs get around,” reflected Cusic. “I produced it on an album that never got released, but somehow, with me doing nothing to promote it, it’s still played and sung more than 40 years after it was written. 

“Amanda Smith once told me that she and other singers had jammed on “It Rains” the night before … and a former student, Kristen Scott Benson, once shared how the song was a great ‘jam’ song when players got together backstage. I checked the Internet, and she’s right! I don’t know how many versions of ‘It Rains Everywhere I Go’ are floating around, but I think I counted 25 once, including some in Japan and Australia.” 

A professor of international music business and music history at Belmont University in Nashville, Cusic has for decades been an active part of the music business. When I caught up with him for a phone call, he was attending the International Country Music Conference in Nashville before heading to Los Angeles for a week of songwriting and arranging. 

A prolific songwriter, Cusic is also a renowned historian of country music and an internationally known scholar, writer, teacher, producer, and executive. He has authored 25 books focused on icons such as Roger Miller, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Reba McIntyre. Cusic has produced greats such as Bobby Bare, Melinda Doolittle, Jim Ed Brown, and Jeannie Seely. His liner notes appear in albums by Dolly Parton, Ray Stevens, Willie Nelson, George Jones, and a host of other legendary country artists. This just scratches the surface of Cusic’s writing accomplishments, which he says are all rooted in songwriting. 

“At 14, I was in a country band, and the first song I wrote was called ‘Willow Tree,’ and it sounded amazingly like the song ‘Lemon Tree,’” he reminisced. “I came along during the urban folk revival. That was really my connection to bluegrass, through those old folk songs. I moved to Nashville and started writing for trade magazines and newspapers and all that evolved into books – but I wrote songs before I wrote anything else.”

Thinking back on “It Rains” and the day he wrote it, Cusic shared that he didn’t sit down to write a “bluegrass” song, but just a good song. “That said, when you’re writing in Nashville, you’re trying to write a country hit,” he explained. “I was writing for April Blackwood Publishers, which was owned by CBS, and I had a notebook with listed ideas and titles. While I don’t remember exactly where I got the idea, I remember one morning coming in with rain ideas. I wanted to write in an A-A-A-B format, and I wanted to use contrasts – things used to be good, but now they’re not.”

With these ideas and a “Don Williams feel” in mind, Cusic wrote the song in less than two hours and recorded a guitar-vocal demo on cassette.   Simple in structure, the song features an almost happy melody that makes for a great juxtaposition against its rainy lyrics. Super singable, the song comes back often to the hook, which bookends its catchy and relatable chorus lyrics (It rains everywhere I go / storms appear and the winds they blow / I got nothing but trouble to show / cause it rains everywhere I go). 

Cusic got his contrasts into the song and used the weather as a perfect metaphor for relationships (the sun used to always shine / love was here and you were mine / weather always seemed so fine / now it rains everywhere I go). In the final verse, he intermingled hope and uncertainty of love’s forecast (They say the sun will shine again / well I believe it but I don’t know when …)

Just after finishing the song, Cusic was set to produce The Hot Mud Family from Dayton, Ohio. “It Rains” became part of that project, which, sadly, never materialized. “We spent a couple of days in the studio,” recalled Cusic. “Sue Edmondson was the lead singer, and she did a terrific job on the song. A small label wanted to release the album, but the group objected. Ken Irwin with Rounder was interested, too, but, somehow, it fell apart. I stuck the master tapes somewhere (I’ve never been able to find them!) and eventually forgot about the sessions and the song.” 

Like its lyrics, “It Rains” seemed to have a dark cloud over it. It didn’t see the sun for many years, but one day, the clouds broke, and the phone rang. “Ken Irwin called to say that he’d cut ‘It Rains Everywhere I Go’ on Lynn Morris, and that he’d sent me a copy,” said Cusic. “I vaguely remembered the song title, but I couldn’t give you a single lyric or tune if my life depended on it. I mean, I hadn’t thought about the song in years, and it was such a number’s game at the time. You’re writing and writing so many songs to try to get a cut. I later learned that Ken had carried the song around for years pitching it. He has good taste in songs!”

Irwin recalls his instant regard for the song, even though he had not yet known Cusic as a songwriter at the time that he heard it. “I loved it,” he recalled, adding that he first heard it on that Hot Mud Family project. “I knew Don then more for his educational and other duties in country music. At that time, I would always listen to something from somebody I knew and respected.”

It took Irwin several years to pair “It Rains” with Morris. He explained, “I think it was Ron Thomason of Dry Branch Fire Squad who said, ‘If everybody had the same taste, we’d only have to make one record.’ Once you hear a song, it can be hard to find someone who will also like it and do it justice. We were working with more traditional bluegrass artists at the time that the song didn’t fit, but it was perfect for Lynn in that it had that melodic flow that so many of her songs do … they’re sort of hooky and hummable, which isn’t always the case with bluegrass. 

“When you’re pitching songs, whether you’re a publisher or a writer, sometimes you luck out with someone else not picking up a song who wouldn’t have done as good a job. I think Lynn was the perfect person, and I was thrilled that she liked it and decided to record it.” 

Cusic enjoyed meeting Lynn Morris once and hearing from her that she loved the song. He has also had songs recorded by The Lewis Family, Ray Stevens, Linda Davis, Chris LeDoux, and many others. Learn more about Cusic and his immense catalog of both songs and nonfiction works at doncusic.com.