“Roses in the Snow” was written by Ruth Franks and first released by Bill Grant, Delia Bell, and The Kiamichi Mountain Boys in 1972 — a recording largely unknown outside the southeastern traditional-country circuit at the time. Emmylou Harris chose it as the title track of her 1980 album of the same name (Warner Bros.), produced by her husband Brian Ahern. The album was recorded in part using Ahern’s Enactron Truck mobile studio and assembled with an ensemble that reads as a gathering of the acoustic revival: Ricky Skaggs on guitar, banjo, fiddle, and harmony vocals; Tony Rice on acoustic guitar; Jerry Douglas on dobro; Albert Lee on guitar; and Bryan Bowers on autoharp. Guests across the record included Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and the Whites.
Warner Bros. executives were reportedly unenthusiastic about the project — the Urban Cowboy sound dominated Nashville radio in 1980, and an album of Appalachian folk, Carter Family hymns, and Paul Simon filtered through a bluegrass ensemble was not what the label had in mind. The album peaked at #2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart regardless. It is now widely credited with creating a direct pathway from the mainstream country audience to the traditional bluegrass and acoustic-country sounds that Ricky Skaggs, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and the New Traditionalists carried into the decade that followed.
A notable version is Harris’s 1980 recording. The album as a whole — and the title track in particular — demonstrated that an artist with mainstream country credentials could make rigorous, acoustically demanding music without abandoning the radio audience. That demonstration mattered enormously for what came next in the bluegrass and acoustic-country tradition.
