12 Days of Winter #4. Anne Briggs: The Snow It Melts The Soonest
December 21, 2024
Andrew Curry writes: The Snow It Melts The Soonest was popularised by Anne Briggs when she finally got round to releasing her vastly influential self-named LP in 1971. Briggs had sung it in her performances during the 1960s, although Archie Fisher had recorded it on his first LP in 1968.
(Detail from the cover of the 1971 LP ‘Anne Briggs’. Artwork by Humphrey Weightman. Image courtesy of Topic Records.)
Since then it has been covered dozens of times by other artists, notably by Dick Gaughan on Handful of Earth. Gaughan said he had learnt it from Fisher “by osmosis”. Pentangle recorded a version on Solomon’s Seal in 1972, with added sitar, which was the first time I heard the song.
The song was collected from a street singer in Newcastle by Thomas Doubleday, a “soap-boiler and radical agitator”, who contributed it to Blackwood’s magazine in 1821 under the pesudonym “Mr Shufflebotham”.
It’s possible that he wrote the words and set them to a traditional melody rather than collecting it.
Of course, we’re big fans of Anne Briggs here at Salut! Live (we had a long piece about her earlier this year). She is one of the great enigmas of English folk music, simply walking away from it, despite that voice. She spent most of the next four decades working with plants, interrupted by a few abortive invitations to perform where she was once again consumed by stage fright.
As she told Jim Wirth, in an interview in Mojo,
”I was always singing to myself. I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous. ... I didn’t like being watched. I didn’t like having my photograph taken."
As for the song, it tells the story of a relationship over the four seasons. At the Mainly Norfolk site, from which I’ve taken much of the information about the history of the song, there’s a lively discussion about how sexist The Snows is.
For his recording, in 1976, the Durham singer Tom Gilfellon said on his sleeve notes,
I still tend to the view that it might just be Male Chauvinist Pig Song of the Year… I recognise the arrogance of the words, and there I’ll let it be. It has a most beautiful tune, however.
He also apologised “in advance” to his women friends and his wife for including the song.
In practice, it depends on which version of the lyrics you use. In the male version, the narrator is confident in his pulling power, although in a 19th century lyric it isn’t put quite like that:
And when a woman tells me that my face she’ll soon forget
Before we part, I’ll wage a crown, she’s fain to follow it yet.
(‘Fain’ is an old English word meaning ‘happily’ or ‘willingly’.)
But Anne Briggs swapped the genders when she sang it. Suddenly it’s not being sung by Lord Flashheart any more, but by a woman who’s confident enough in herself and her qualities that her lover will return:
Oh the snow it melts the soonest when the winds begin to sing
And the swallow skims without a thought as long as it is spring
But when spring blows and winter goes my lad then you’d be fain
With all your pride for to follow me, were it ’cross the stormy main.
To read more on Anne Briggs at Salut Live:
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