“Rain and Snow,” also sung as “Cold Rain and Snow” (Roud 3634), is a North Carolina mountain song that some singers turn into a murder ballad. It first appeared in print in 1917, in Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. They had collected it the year before from Mrs. Tom Rice at Big Laurel, in Madison County, and printed a single verse: a man who married a wife who gave him trouble all his life and made him work in the cold rain and snow. British songs about miserable marriages share the theme, but the ballad seems to have grown up locally. Its tune varies little, and most performances use the Campbell–Sharp melody as written.
Later singers added verses, and the song moved in two directions. Obray Ramsey, a North Carolina banjo player, recorded it in 1961 for Kenneth Goldstein on the Prestige International album Obray Ramsey Sings Folksongs From The Three Laurels. In 1965 Dillard Chandler recorded a graphic version that ends with the husband shooting his wife. Chandler had learned it from Berzilla Wallin, who heard it in 1911 from an older woman. That woman connected the song to a Madison County murder from her girlhood, for which the killer was given 99 years rather than hanged. Some versions keep to the husband’s complaint. Others only hint at a killing: in the verses Del McCoury sings, the wife comes down the stairs combing her long yellow hair, and the last verse has her meet her doom.
The Grateful Dead learned the song from Ramsey’s album and recorded “Cold Rain and Snow” on their first LP, The Grateful Dead (1967). It stayed in their concerts for the rest of their career, often as an opener. In their lyric the husband complains of his wife’s mistreatment but does not kill her. Near the end of his life Benjamin Britten arranged the one-verse 1917 text as the opening of his Eight Folk Song Arrangements (1976).
Del McCoury has recorded it more than once. A Nashville session of 9 August 1971, with Dick Staber on mandolin, John Farmer on banjo, Buddy Spicher and Jimmy Buchanan on fiddles and Dewey Renfro on bass, was issued by Rebel on the CD Livin’ on the Mountain in 1992. In 1974 he cut it with the Dixie Pals (Bill Runkle, Donnie Eldreth, Bill Poffinberger and Renfro) at Roy Homer’s studio in Clinton, Maryland, and it opened his 1975 Rebel LP Del McCoury. Other recordings include Muleskinner’s A Potpourri of Bluegrass Jam (Warner Bros., 1974), the Chieftains’ Down the Old Plank Road (2002), Peter Rowan and Tony Rice’s Quartet (Rounder, 2007), and Chris Thile and Michael Daves’s Sleep With One Eye Open (Nonesuch, 2011).
