Murder Ballad MondayCold Rain and Snow – Introduction
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Cold Rain and Snow – Introduction — 6 Comments

  1. Some readers of this blog may be interested to know that it’s sort of because of me that the Dead do this song. In the early 1960’s, I played a lot with Jerry Garcia, old-time music and bluegrass. In 1963, I did a road-trip pilgrimage through the South to meet some of the older old-time musicians before they died. One of the people I visited with was Obray Ramsey, who taught me how to play his version of Cold Rain and Snow on the banjo. When I got back to the Bay Area, I taught the song and the banjo part to Jerry. In our conversations over the years, Jerry always agreed that he learned the song from me.

    • Ken, thanks for reading this and for adding that depth to the story! It’s an interesting twist, in that it means the initial transmission of the ballad to the West Coast was in the old way thanks to your road trip and musician’s ear. It’s a cool detail, knowing that this link in that chain is a picker/singer, not a record player! One foot in the old world and one in the new, I suppose. I don’t suppose Mr. Ramsey gave you any insight into the deep history of the song that you might remember? (A long time ago to remember even if he did pass it on, but hey, I gotta ask!)

    • Patrick, Obray said he learned it from someone who sang it unaccompanied (no instrument), and he added the banjo part which he made up himself. This is interesting to me, because you can kind of trace the song with it’s present chords from Obray to me to Jerry to most of the people who play it now. This assumes Obray was accurate in his statement. He was very proud of his banjo part, and there’s no way to know if he really made it up completely by himself. Having chords in the song determines its feel, and also constrains the melody more than singing it unaccompanied would.

  2. I just wandered over here from a google search after hearing the Obray Ramsey version of the song for the first time. I was surprised to hear the murder in the lyrics, since they aren’t in the familiar Grateful Dead versions.

    Has anybody gone through the court records and found out who the murderer and victim were?

    • Hey, thanks for wandering over! To my knowledge no one has done so. If they have, I haven’t seen the results online. It’s certainly do-able, as we saw such information in our studies of both “Omie Wise” and “Tom Dooley”.

  3. Great post, Pat! Thanks for clearing out the clutter and finding that some of these old songs aren’t necessarily as old as some would make them out to be. I’m not surprised that Pentangle and Cecil Sharp both turn out to be red herrings of a sort. We’ve seen that Pentangle likes to pick up American balladry and bring it back to a British audience (with the world music inflection that you note). They performed “Omie Wise” and opted for the American “House Carpenter” variant of Child 243.

    As for Sharp, “Swannanoa Tunnel” also wound up in the same book, and could also only be attributed to very diffuse and indirect English sources (a fragment of a tune, or something like that).