“It’s Raining Here This Morning” is generally credited to Grandpa Jones (Louis Marshall Jones), the Grand Ole Opry old-time-banjo and country-comic performer whose songbook included a handful of pieces that crossed cleanly into bluegrass and acoustic-country sets. The lyric is in the older prison-and-loss tradition: the narrator writing from a jail cell, the rain steady outside, the Mississippi rolling somewhere beyond the wall, the woman of his life long since gone.
The recording most contemporary listeners know is Norman Blake and Tony Rice’s reading on their 1990 Rounder duo album Norman Blake & Tony Rice 2. The Blake/Rice duo recordings are widely regarded as a high point of late-1980s and early-1990s flatpicking; their reading slows the tempo, opens the harmonic shape, and lets the lyric’s mournful imagery carry the recording.
The song belongs to a small constellation of country-and-bluegrass pieces — alongside “The Long Black Veil” and “Folsom Prison Blues” — that work the rain-and-prison-and-distant-river imagery without escalating into melodrama.
