“Footprints in the Snow” descends from an 1880-era English music-hall song “Footmarks in the Snow,” written by the British music-hall songwriter Harry Wright for his wife, the singer and dancer Nellie Gannon. (Some sources place the original publication as early as 1875.) The song was widely pirated and reprinted by 19th-century publishers under the alternate title “I Traced Her Little Footprints in the Snow,” and it became a transatlantic music-hall hit.
The song’s first commercial recording came from Dave Walker in 1931, but the canonical version is Bill Monroe’s. Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys recorded “Footprints in the Snow” on February 13, 1945, at WBBM radio studios in Chicago, with Tex Willis on guitar, Chubby Wise on fiddle, David “Stringbean” Akeman on banjo, Wilene “Sally Ann” Forrester on accordion, and Bill Westbrook on bass. The Monroe recording effectively established the song as a bluegrass standard.
The song’s narrative — a heartbroken man retracing his lost lover’s footprints through the snow — sits in the Anglo-American sentimental ballad tradition that Monroe drew on heavily for his classic-era catalog. “Footprints in the Snow” remains one of the most-called Monroe songs at jams and one of the most reliable winter-themed pieces in the bluegrass repertoire. It has been recorded by virtually every major bluegrass act since.
