"One of the reasons I was in a rock band was to see the world. As a kid, I’d always been fascinated by Africa. I loved movies about Dr Livingstone and missionaries. I went to an all-boys Catholic school and a lot of the teachers had done missionary work in Africa. They told me how they would bless the villagers, their Bibles, their books, their crops and, when it rained, they’d bless the rain. That’s where the hook line – “I bless the rains down in Africa” – came from.They said loneliness and celibacy were the hardest things about life out there. Some of them never made it into the priesthood because they needed companionship. So I wrote about a person flying in to meet a lonely missionary. It’s a romanticised love story about Africa, based on how I’d always imagined it. The descriptions of its beautiful landscape came from what I’d read in National Geographic."
Thank goodness he wrote it before the P.C. brigade started screeching about "cultural appropriation" or else poor Mr. Paich probably would have been chased by torch-carrying, pitchfork-waving mob instead of having a hit song, because that's the level of stupid we're at now.
There have been many covers of this song, and the one I've heard most often is by the a cappella group Straight No Chaser, because a couple of my sisters were addicted to them and played their songs over and over. The version we're doing this weekend is the one which can be seen on YouTube, sung by the Angel City Chorale. We're doing it the same way, complete with the choreography and sound effects: