“Early Morning Rain” is a song by the Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, written in the mid-1960s and one of the compositions that established his reputation. Lightfoot has traced its roots to an earlier stretch he spent in Los Angeles around 1960, when, homesick and at loose ends, he would go out to the airport on rainy days to watch the planes.
That image shapes the song. Its narrator is a down-on-his-luck man, far from home and out of money, watching a jet lift off into the rain without him — a modern picture of the old hard-traveling theme, with a Boeing 707 standing in for the freight train of earlier ballads. The song reached listeners early through Judy Collins, Ian and Sylvia, and Peter, Paul and Mary, all of whom recorded it around the time Lightfoot’s own version appeared.
It went on to become one of the most widely covered songs of its era, recorded by artists as varied as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, and it crossed readily into the bluegrass and acoustic repertoire.
