Rain and Snow

Traditional Appalachian song and, in some variants, murder ballad (Roud 3634), also known as “Cold Rain and Snow,” collected by Cecil Sharp from Mrs. Tom Rice at Big Laurel, Madison County, North Carolina in August 1916 and published the following year in Campbell and Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians — as a single verse about a wife who made her husband work in the cold rain and snow. According to local tradition reported by singer Berzilla Wallin, the song grew out of an actual wife-murder in Madison County sometime between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, and despite the violent subject, women have been its principal carriers in oral tradition. Obray Ramsey recorded it for Prestige International in 1961, and Dillard Chandler’s 1965 recording (learned from Wallin) preserves the full murder-ballad ending, in which the husband shoots his wife. The Grateful Dead learned the song from Ramsey’s record, put it on their 1967 debut album as “Cold Rain and Snow,” and kept it in their repertoire for thirty years, while Del McCoury made it a bluegrass standard, opening his Rebel Records Del McCoury LP with it in the early 1970s.