Early Morning Rain

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Early Morning Rain

Written by Gordon Lightfoot, 1964

Long before Gordon Lightfoot became one of Canada’s best-loved voices, he was a young man a long way from home. Around 1960 he was living in Los Angeles, studying music at Westlake College of Music, and he sometimes grew terribly homesick for Ontario. On rainy days he would drive out to Los Angeles International Airport, find a spot where he could watch the planes come in, and simply look at them for a while. The sight of those airliners climbing up into the gray, overcast sky stayed with him.

Several years later, back in Canada, the memory finally found its way into a song. It was 1964, and Lightfoot was at home looking after his five-month-old son. He later remembered thinking, “I’ll put him over here in his crib, and I’ll write myself a tune.” The tune turned out to be “Early Morning Rain.”

The song tells of a man down on his luck, standing by an airport fence with almost nothing in his pockets, watching a big Boeing 707 roar off toward home without him. Listeners have often heard it as an old hobo’s story brought into the jet age. A drifter in earlier times might have caught a ride on a passing freight car, but a jetliner offers no such chance, and so the man is left behind in the rain.

Lightfoot recorded his own version in December 1964, but his record company held onto it, and his debut album, Lightfoot!, didn’t come out until January 1966. By then other singers had already carried the song far and wide. The Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia recorded it first, and in 1965 Peter, Paul and Mary released their version, which reached No. 91 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 39 in Canada. In 1966 George Hamilton IV took it to No. 9 on the American country chart.

The song kept traveling for decades. Bob Dylan included it on his 1970 album Self Portrait. Elvis Presley recorded it and sang it in concert many times. The Warlocks, the young band that soon became the Grateful Dead, cut a version in a San Francisco studio in 1965. As late as 2005, the English singer Paul Weller carried it to No. 40 on the British charts. It is one of the most widely recorded songs Lightfoot ever wrote, and it is also the song that first made people pay attention to him as a songwriter. When Gordon Lightfoot died in May 2023, this quiet song about a lonely man at an airport was still among the ones people remembered him by.