Tay Zonday
American YouTube personality
Adam Nyerere Bahner (born May 21, 1982), known professionally as Tay Zonday or as "Chocolate Rain Guy", is an American YouTube personality, singer-songwriter, and voice actor. He is known for his bass singing voice.
Zonday garnered mainstream exposure when his song "Chocolate Rain" became a viral video and Internet meme in July 2007. As of June 2026, "Chocolate Rain" has 142.7 million views on YouTube.
Early life
Zonday was born Adam Nyerere Bahner in Chicago, Illinois, to an African-American mother and a Caucasian father. He is the youngest of three children, and his parents were both teachers. He attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a residential public school for highly gifted students, and dropped out before graduating. He later graduated from Evergreen State College in 2004. Zonday is autistic, having been diagnosed as high-functioning in 1997, at age 15.
Zonday enrolled in the University of Minnesota American Studies PhD program in 2004, studying the history of theater and social change, with the intention of becoming a professor.
The public source identifies “Tay Zonday” as american YouTube personality. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Zonday, American and YouTube.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55449. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 2007, 2026 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tay Zonday” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.