I’m posting this to sum up the wettest May in memory – in the hope that the act of doing so I will immediately banish the never-ending deluge.

It was a similar downpour that inspired this timeless classic one sultry evening in Memphis in 1973, when the recently signed soul singer Ann Peebles was on her way to a concert with her boyfriend Don Bryant and a DJ called Bernie Miller.

Just as they were about to set off, the heavens opened, and she snapped, as many of us surely have before and since: “I can’t stand the rain.” At that moment a song was born.

Bryant, who was working as a staff songwriter at Hi Records, recognised a catchy phrase when he heard one. So he sat down at the piano right there and then and got to work.

Forgetting all about the concert, he carried on composing throughout the evening, weaving in ideas from Peebles and Miller. By the end of the night he had the finished song.

He presented it the following morning to Willie Mitchell, the man who transformed 1950s-founded Hi Records from a country and rockabilly label to a home for soul artists like Al Green and O.V. Wright.

Mitchell, the label’s in-house producer, produced the song himself and came up with the idea of adding the gimmick that captured everyone’s imagination: the sound of the raindrops – recorded with a brand new gadget called an electric timbale.

“At first we had the timbales all the way through the song,” Peebles recalled later, “but as we played the tape Willie said: ‘What about if the timbales were in front before anything else comes in?’. So we did that and when we listened back I said: ‘I love it, let’s do that’.”

With a background in a family gospel group, Peebles sang Southern soul standards with a powerful voice and feisty attitude that belied her diminutive stature, demonstrated in songs like I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down, I Pity The Fool and I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home.

John Lennon once told an interviewer this was “the best song ever” and it was one of Ian Dury’s Desert Island Discs – but it was never a big hit, reaching only number 38 in America and missing out by one place on the UK Top 40.