“Rain and Snow” (also “Cold Rain and Snow”) is a traditional Anglo-American ballad with roots in the older southern Appalachian repertoire. Cecil Sharp collected variants of the lyric during his 1916–1918 fieldwork in the southern mountains; the song was published in his English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians collection, and the version most widely sung today descends from those early collected texts.
The lyric is a thwarted-marriage narrative: the singer’s wife is determined to leave him out in the cold rain and snow, and the song works through her cruelty in plain-spoken verses. Some American variants frame the lyric as a husband’s confession to murder; others stay with the cold-rain-and-snow imagery as straight grievance. The song’s modal melody and floating-verse structure made it adaptable across performers.
The Grateful Dead’s 1967 self-titled debut included a reading that brought the song into the rock-and-acoustic-revival audiences of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Del McCoury Band’s 1992 reading on Don’t Stop the Music — the version associated with this entry — is the bluegrass-canonical modern recording, with McCoury’s high-tenor lead and his sons’ tight family harmony giving the song the burnished traditional surface that defines the band’s catalogue. It works as a moderate-up-tempo vocal piece in G with a clear banjo break.
