As we found out in the introductory post this week, “Cold Rain and Snow”, which most folks know as a staple in the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, is an American ballad written by an unknown author after a man murdered his wife in Madison County, North Carolina a decade or two after the end of the Civil War.  Despite what Cecil Sharp suggested, it’s not British!  My first post uncovers the truth of the ballad’s origins, both in terms of its genesis and to some degree the musical milieu in which it was born and grew in the highlands of western North Carolina at the turn of the last century.  As well, that post and an earlier one touch on the song’s place in the Dead’s weird and wonderful musical mix.

For reasons that are clear – the main one being, it’s just a hell of a powerful song – musicians have been covering this tune since Obray Ramsey and the Grateful Dead brought it to their respective (and at times overlapping) audiences in the mid-1960’s.  We’ll check out some of that work today.  While I won’t link up to all forty some versions in my Spotify playlist, I’ll hit some of the highlights.  And, while today’s entry is more for listeners than readers, I will briefly take up the question that must arise after listening to the most compelling of these covers.  Why do women play and sing this song so soulfully when the subject seems to be misogyny at its worst?

But first, let’s listen.

Men’s Voices

While the Grateful Dead were rocketing this song to Mars and beyond, it was also going through a more conventional American journey for an Appalachian murder ballad – from old-time A capella to high lonesome bluegrass standard.  Bill Monroe’s band, with Peter Rowan on guitar, was playing it that way in the ’60’s, though I can’t find a version at the moment.  Instead, I offer two outstanding interpreters, both using Obray Ramsey’s lyrics with only the slightest variation.

First, we have Del McCoury, with a track from his eponymous 1976 album, as well as one from his performance of the ballad with The Chieftains.

    Lyrics for Del McCoury’s version

Our second bluegrass cut is a truly outstanding 21st century example of instrumental virtuosity from Peter Rowan and Tony Rice (accompanied masterfully by Sharon Gilchrist and Bryn Davies.)  The YouTube video is listenable and visually interesting for any guitar picker, mando and bass player, but it’s rather washed out on the high end. The Spotify track though, from the 2007 album Quartet, is a must listen.  For my money, it’s musically the most complex and satisfying of any here.

“Cold Rain and Snow” – Peter Rowan and Tony Rice (Spotify)   Lyrics for Peter Rowan’s version

The bluegrass standard follows Obray Ramsey’s formula.  The violence is understated – neither simply implied nor graphically explicit.  In some ways I suppose it’s understandable given that Ramsey’s track was produced for an audience of Cold War folk music consumers. Bluegrass as well often carefully negotiates the market terrain that arises with violent lyrics and themes, so Ramsey’s version may appeal in that sense.  Still, folk, bluegrass and country music more generally have never exactly shied away from violence.  So, does it also have something to do with gender and the relationship in the ballad- with the fact that men are singing the song about murdering a wife?  Somehow, making it more graphic crosses a line?  I don’t know the answer, but it could make for some interesting discussion.

Ramsey’s version is still very much alive.  Here’s a quite recent example from an up-and-coming New England folk musician – and it’s our final one in a man’s voice.  Sam Amidon‘s musical treatment is not traditional, though it is acoustic and both lovely and haunting at once.  We only have a YouTube clip, and the lyrics are here.

The way Amidon sings it gives me chills, but again, it’s not because of explicit violence.  The bright *fact* of the murder is muted, and this somehow allows the subtler light of the emotional back story to emerge.  This I find fascinating, though interestingly it also moves us a bit further away from our meat and potatoes in this blog.  No one is making a fiddle out of bones here – no cage either!

Women’s Voices

Luckily for us, many female performers hold back less on swinging the sharp edge this ballad has in its traditional form – like Dillard Chandler’s for example, and Pentangle’s, both of which we heard in the first post this week.  Let’s start with a version of the latter.

The Be Good Tanyas generally play a sort of music guaranteed to soothe the savage soul.  With this song, it’s hard to believe the musical line between mellow and harsh can be so utterly fine, and can be danced upon so gracefully.  You can’t beat this one for a raw but perfect balance between music and vocals.  Pentangle’s lyrics work quite well in the setting they give them, and you can almost hear a hint of sitar in the way the Tanyas play it.

“Rain and Snow” – The Be Good Tanyas (Spotify)       Lyrics for The Be Good Tanyas’ version

Next in our lineup, Rose Laughlin cut a version of “Cold Rain and Snow” on her second album The Chicago Sessions in 2008 that stands out as unique in my playlist.  The bodhran helps creates the right tone for Dillard Chandler’s lyrics, and the modulation accompanying the act of murder is effective, as is the trail off… “I dropped to my knees with cold fear…”  Unfortunately we only have a Spotify version today.

Lyrics for Rose Laughlin’s version

If you didn’t get it with the Tanyas’ version, I imagine you have it now with Laughlin’s – hearing this ballad in a woman’s voice is just a world apart from hearing it in a man’s.  Maybe I’m just reading in my own horror, but I think it’s more.  It’s just… Well, how is it that women can deliver this the way they do?

Before I wrestle with that question, consider as a final example a lovely effort from The Lonesome Sisters, recently of the Pioneer Valley just east of where I live and work in the Berkshires and the Greens.  There is just nothing wrong with this track.  It is from their 2004 collaboration with Riley Baugus.

“Rain and Snow” – The Lonesome Sisters  (Spotify)    Lyrics for The Lonesome Sisters’ version

Interestingly, the Sisters’ version includes new lyrics, and we can finally see this ballad growing more than musically!

Her baby cried all night,

I know that what I done ain’t right

the wind howls her name oh so low

This verse takes the song one step past the chilling line in Chandler’s version, where the killer ends up on his knees.  Here, not only is he horrified by himself in the moment, he sees the long term consequences.  The wind reminds him every night of his victim; of his wife.  I’m curious as to the choice of “her baby” instead of “our baby” or “my baby.”  It could add the element of infidelity to the ballad, maybe as one more hollow justification for cold-blooded murder.  Or, it could just sound better!  At any rate, the ambiguity works.

Coda

So, is it that female artists today have reclaimed a song of misogyny and made it their own?  That strikes me as a little too political an answer for musicians – but what do I know?  That may be the thinking behind some of these tracks; I wonder though if it’s something more fundamental.

I wonder if “Rain and Snow” isn’t actually a woman’s song in the first place, and that these versions in women’s voices work because the song is essentially wired to work that way.

“But wait,” you say; “the most authentic and brutal version we’ve heard is in a man’s voice – traditional singer Dillard Chandler‘s.”  My friends, that doesn’t prove a thing.

Dillard Chandler was also the most excellent performer of “I Wish My Baby Was Born.”  Please, give it a listen, then ask yourself if he is stuck in singing from a man’s perspective.

Yeah, I thought you’d see it my way.  Of course, that doesn’t prove that a woman wrote “Rain and Snow” either.

But consider the information we gathered in the first post this week.  The oldest recorded scrap of this ballad was sung by a woman (Mrs. Tom Rice) to Cecil Sharp in 1916 in Madison County, North Carolina, the site of the murder described in the song.  Indeed, we learned from Berzilla Wallin that she got the ballad from another woman there in 1911, and that her source had learned it as a girl not long after it was written.  If the ballad was written in the 1870’s or 1880’s, as seems likely, we can at least feel sure in saying women were singing this song since its birth or thereabouts.

I think when you hear the women we’ve heard in this post singing the hell out of this song – well, that’s exactly what they’re doing…  they’re singing through the hell of the violence, through the sin of murder, and revealing something about humanity.  I think they’ve brought this song back to its beginning really.

It seems whoever wrote it wasn’t just trying to tell the awful news from Madison County.  And I don’t see it as only a warning to young women about violent men.  It’s got that horsepower, for sure.  But you can tell, I think, that it’s got more under the hood.

From Obray Ramsey and the Grateful Dead through every version we’ve heard, the spare lyrics dare the singer to step directly into the shoes of the killer.  That’s obviously not something you get with a CNN crime report or a finger-wagging lecture.  Theater can do that, as well as books and movies – but not quite like a murder ballad, particularly for people living in a time and place like Appalachia just after a ravaging Civil War.

Since publication of this piece, I’ve worked with both Ruth Gerson’s and Dan Dutton’s perspective on murder ballads, and they share in common an idea that takes the murder ballad out of its dusty place in the Museum of Odd Folk Music and puts it squarely back in the world of the living first person.  Dutton believes that stepping through the ballad into “the otherworld” and inhabiting the shoes of the killer, thus touching one’s own impulse for aggression and rage, can act as a vaccine against the articulation of such violence.  By briefly erasing the imaginary distance between yourself and the aggressor in the art of balladry, you distance yourself in reality from that aggression.  Gerson said something similar in talking about ‘the allure of the murder ballad.’

In Alice Miller’s book, For Your Own Good, she discusses the roots of violence in child rearing, and says that when expression is stymied, the brain suffers a duress that causes it to enact its rage. Expression is the means by which the brain can process rage. Without expression, the stress induced by human rage plays out in violence.

Speaking for myself, the allure of the music has to do with a desire to understand why, when we come face-to-face with another, we can annihilate. I can understand an impulse to want to, but I cannot understand where, once met with the face of another who holds no threat to me and could not defend herself, I would get the ability to do what’s done in these songs. I have grappled with and studied violence since I was in high school. I sing about it because I want to talk about it. Trying to understand it is part of who I am.

In my most humble opinion “Rain and Snow” is not misogyny, it’s pure compassion: or maybe pure religion depending on how you look at it – mysticism that is – or more than just simple morality at least.

What I mean is this: I imagine whoever wrote it (man or woman), deeply moved by that murder, was trying to find a way to tell the men thereabouts, indeed to help them experience in as deep a fashion as s/he could muster, the truth.  ‘I know how you might feel sometimes, but a good man don’t ever do any woman like that man done her.’

Thank you, folks, for letting me ramble.  I hope you enjoyed the tunes!