One critic’s view: “[W]hat the hell do people like about this schlock? ... The best I can come up with is that the Serendipity Singers evoke memories of a simpler time, when dad went off to work, mom stayed in the kitchen, and everybody’s tastes in music were for shit.” – TVD HQ @ The Vinyl District, in a review of the Serendipities’ greatest hits compilation
The public’s view: 2.57 / 5.00
I had never heard of the Serendipity Singers until I researched the history of unloved top 10 hits for this blog, but their name gave me an idea of what they might sound like. I suspected that they were closer to the Mike Curb Congregation than they were to Slipknot, and I was right. The Serendipities were a nine-member group from Colorado that was designed for people who liked folk music but who didn’t want the liberal connotations. The group did dabble in the political arena by performing for LBJ in 1964, which was not a terribly controversial move in that landslide year, but it’s a huge stretch to find an ideological message in their lyrics. If there is any such meaning in “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down”, you have to go deep down a gopher hole to find it. Naturally, someone did.
“Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” is based on a centuries-old nursery rhyme about a man who buys some nails to mend the leaky roof of his house. This poem was probably written as either a fun diversion for children or as a radio jingle for a medieval hardware store, but some scholars have refused to accept either hypothesis. Rather, they suggest that the man’s crumbling abode is a metaphor for the uneasy alliance between Scotland and England. I’m skeptical of this analysis, which relies on multiple iffy assumptions, but a Ph.D. is a license to reinterpret any work as long as the author is too dead to object. One professor used to maintain that “Humpty Dumpty” was an allegory about the Royalist army’s siege of Gloucester in 1643, and other historians nodded their heads and agreed until someone with common sense stepped in to debunk this theory. I’m waiting for some random academic to claim that “Baby Sittin’ Boogie” was intended as a brutal satire of Henry VI’s conduct during the Wars of the Roses.
I doubt that the Serendipities had any strong feelings about England or Scotland, other than wishing that the Royalist army would put a siege on Liverpool. When “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” was at its peak, it had to compete with three Beatles records that were in the top 10 at the same time. It was a close call as to which would ultimately be the bigger of the two acts, but the Serendipities did not prevail. They followed their one big single with a track called “Down Where the Winds Blow” and a tune about beans, but I can’t think of anything cute to say about those two songs. Eventually the group got tired of tooting its own horn and making a big stink, so it squeaked out the back door and disbanded. A different lineup of musicians later used the Serendipity Singers’ name to campaign for the Young Republicans, thereby blowing the act’s folk legacy away with a cloud of noxious gas. These replacements for the original Serendipities weren’t exactly silent but they were deadly.
While “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” may not be the most inventive song of the decade, the Serendipities had enough personality to make this mundane story about roof repair somewhat interesting. I especially like the rendition from the group’s reunion concert, with the little flourish in which one of the performers raps on his colleague’s bald head. Even if the lyrics really are some coded message about Scotland, this record still beats a whiney love ballad any day of the week. I just wish we knew whether the guy with the bad roof actually does drown when it finally starts raining.
In an alternate dimension, music historians classify 1964 as the year of the Colorado Invasion and praise the Serendipity Singers as “The Fab Nine”. It isn’t a bad dimension to visit, though I wouldn’t want to live there.
My rating: 7 / 10
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