Rain And Snow: A Song History
"Rain and Snow" is a Southern Appalachian murder ballad in which a man, tired of the trouble his wife has given him, kills her.[1] The oldest version found in the sources consulted here is a single verse with its tune, which Cecil Sharp noted from Mrs. Tom Rice at Big Laurel, North Carolina, on August 18, 1916.[2] Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell printed it as No. 63 in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917), and in his introduction Sharp counted it among the song texts he had not been able to trace in the main published English collections.[2] Folk-song indexes catalogue it as Roud 3634.[1][3]
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View on the New Turnpike Road, on the Margin of the Juniata, with a Distant View of the Warrior Mountain, watercolor, graphite, brown ink, and sgraffito on paper, 1820. A snowy mountain road in Pennsylvania, shown for the title; it has no connection to the ballad.
The Traditional Ballad Index lists a recording by the singer Dillard Chandler.[1] A 2012 Sing Out! essay by Patrick Blackman places Mrs. Rice in Madison County, North Carolina, and reports that Berzilla Wallin learned the ballad from another woman in that county in 1911.[4] Blackman argues that it is an American song by an unknown writer, made after a murder in Madison County, probably in the 1870s or 1880s.[4] According to that essay, Obray Ramsey and the Grateful Dead brought the song to their audiences in the mid-1960s.[4] The Dead put "Cold Rain and Snow" on their first album, issued by Warner Bros. in March 1967, crediting the adaptation to their group pseudonym.[5] Notes on the band's own website count it among the songs they played from their earliest days.[6]
Later recordings include Pentangle's on Reflection (1971), Del McCoury's 1976 album track, and Molly Tuttle's 2022 version.[3][4] For mountain dulcimer, "Rain And Snow" is among the 35 arrangements in Neal Hellman's Mountain Dulcimer Arrangements From Both Sides Of The Atlantic, a Fingers Of Steel download that comes with an MP3 recording of each song.[7]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index (Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle): "Rain and Snow".
- Internet Archive: "Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Rain and Snow".
- Sing Out!: "I ain't gonna be treated this way... 'Rain and Snow,' Part 2".
- DeadDisc: "The Grateful Dead (Warner Bros. WS-1689, 1967)".
- Grateful Dead (dead.net): "Cold Rain and Snow".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Neal Hellman, Mountain Dulcimer Arrangements From Both Sides Of The Atlantic".
- Image: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View on the New Turnpike Road, on the Margin of the Juniata, with a Distant View of the Warrior Mountain, watercolor, graphite, brown ink, and sgraffito on paper, 1820. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.