Beyond the Rainbow at Midnight
A short meditation on the world's first redneck-hippie back to the land anthem
I've long been fascinated with the song "Rainbow at Midnight," which Wikipedia insultingly defines as a "novelty song" for some reason I can't quite fathom...
Listen for yourself -- does it sound like a novelty song to you?
I mean… “Yes, We Have No Bananas” it ain’t.
The interpretation I learned from the late dulcimer maestro David Schnaufer was that it was written from the POV of a GI returning home from the North Pacific.
While on the transport home from the Aleutians, he is treated to a display of the Aurora Borealis -- the rainbow at midnight…
After the war was over
I was coming home to you
I saw a rainbow at midnight
Out on the ocean blue
And he gets the chills and makes him yearn more to go home…
The stars in heaven were shining
The moon gave its light from above
I saw your face in this rainbow
And it made me think of our love
And he has an epiphany:
We'll build a home in the country
And make all our dreams come true
There we will make a heaven
Sweetheart, for just we two
Here we will live so happy
And have a baby or two
We'll name them after the rainbow
Because it reminds me of you
After this life is over
And our journey here is through
We'll move to the land of the rainbow
And live in the starry blue
Again, I say, what is novelty about that? How on god’s green earth does this share a scintilla of musical DNA with “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” or “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth”?
One thing a novelty thing needs to be: “funny.” Scare quotes because most aren’t, though some are, the first, and second, and maybe even third time you hear them.
One thing a novelty song can’t be: poignant.
“Rainbow at Midnight” is not funny in the slightest and it’s poignant AF. It is nothing less than the Original Hippie Redneck Anthem.
So: it is not a fucking novelty song, Wikipedia. Cancel my subscription!
Anyway….the Carlisle Brothers cut it first in 1946 but Ernest Tubb had the big hit with it a few months later. After that, it was but by everyone from that other Jimmie Rodgers (the “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” guy) to the Osborne Brothers (if you need to hear it sung by a tenor who could actually sing, instead of a baritone like Tubb, who couldn’t) to Gene Vincent (lame uptempo version) to raw Delta bluesman James “Son” Thomas, whose studio recording is unavailable and whose live rendition seems a bit…impaired. (The Oak Ridge Boys have a terrible but different song by the same name.)
Anyway, I am on a relatively obscure country songwriter kick, so I dug in as deep as I could on the author of this obscure non-novelty classic. Turns out it was a man from Rabun County, Georgia by the name of Lost John Miller, who had a ten-year postwar heyday knocking around the South as “Lost John Miller and his Allied Kentuckians,” and if that band name don’t beat all, I don’t know what does. (Here he is doing a “Lonesome Whistle”-type hillbilly dirge; he’s a bit overwrought as a singer, to my taste. Not sure if he’s ripping off Hank or vice-versa there.)
Anyway, for a little bit, one of the Allied Kentuckians was the pre-Bill Monroe Earl Scruggs….And Scruggs left when Lost John quit touring, and then Lost John died youngish (1961, at about 50), leaving behind scant few press clippings and fewer readily available recordings.
And one amazing song. One I would bet helped inspire a song one could argue was, in fact, a novelty song: John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream”: you now, the one about blowing up your TV, throwing away your paper, moving to the country, having a bunch of babies, feeding them on peaches, and letting them find Jesus, on their own. (In both songs, it’s a soldier in the male role, even if Lost John was crooning to a sweetheart and Prine was talking about a stripper. Or check that, a “level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol”…)
That could be a novelty song, because it is funny, but it is not a novelty song, because, as with so many Prine songs, it is funny and poignant. And I really don’t think he could have written “Spanish Pipedream” without Lost John’s “Rainbow at Midnight” illuminating the way.
Allied Kentuckians indeed.
Well done and, speaking of the Allied Kentuckians, they inspired a group of students from McCallie H.S. in Chattanooga who named themselves the Dismembered Tennesseans in 1945. They were led by Walter Forbes who came to Nashville to work with Chet Atkins and who could well have been a major star but the Beatles and the "English invasion" knocked the pins out of his career and many others working in the country/bluegrass genre's. Forbes made several really good solo albums and also was the man who brought Norman Blake to Nashville and helped launch Blake's ongoing career! The Dismembered Tennesseans were still active until just after the turn of the century. Forbes created a DVD documenting the D.T.'s story in 2003 that can still be found though at a high price due to its rarity. Despite the name, they, like "Rainbow At Midnight", were not a novelty. And, through his friendship with "Cowboy" Jack Clement, Forbes got to know and hang out with John Prine.
Agreed! Not a novelty song at all. Fie, Wikipedia, fie!