“Dreadful Wind and Rain” is an American descendant of one of the oldest ballads in the English-language tradition — “The Twa Sisters,” catalogued by the folklorist Francis James Child as number 10 in his collection. The oldest known printed version dates to 1656, and Child gathered more variants of this ballad than of nearly any other, a measure of how far it traveled across Britain, Ireland, and later North America.
The story is a murder ballad: two sisters are courted by the same suitor, and the elder, consumed by jealousy, drowns the younger in a river. In the older versions the drowned girl’s body washes to a mill, where a passing musician fashions an instrument from her remains — her hair strung as fiddle strings, her bones turned to pegs — and the instrument sings out, naming the murderer. American singers in Appalachia pared the tale down and attached the haunting refrain about the wind and the rain that gives the song its familiar titles.
The version recorded by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman on their 1996 album “Shady Grove” helped carry the ballad to a wide modern audience. Sparse, grave, and set in a modal key, it keeps the centuries-old chill of the story intact while stripping it to its essentials.
