The Songs:
1. The Snow is on the Ground Eleazor Tillett (1951) 2. The Snow is on the Ground Jeff Warner and Barbara Benn (2005)
From 1938 to 1975 Anne and Frank Warner collected authentic folk music from old-timers in Greenwich Village in New York City where they lived, and from remote communities along the Southern US Eastern Seaboard, especially North and South Carolina. They were not academic collectors earning a living through research grants. According to Alan Lomax: "For many years the Warners spent every vacation and every scrap of spare cash on their recording trips. It was a continuous act of unpaid, tender devotion to American folk song and a life-long love affair with the people who remembered the ballads..."
The Warners’ collection and dissemination of some songs proved influential, including Tom Dooley which the Kingston Trio recorded in 1958 and which rose to the top of the pop music charts. That is credited with bringing folk music into popular tastes and kick-starting the Folk Revival, They also collected "He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands" which became one of the anthems of that movement.
The Warners didn’t just collect songs from rural people. They respected them and their memories; they got to know them and became their friends. Perhaps more importantly in the long run, the Warners’ life-long passion has left a legacy of 1000 field recordings of authentic traditional folk music that otherwise might have become forgotten and lost to history. Those recordings are now held by the US Library of Congress. Many of those songs have still never gotten public attention, but they are there to be discovered by some future generation when our authentic musical heritage from regular folks again sparks the public’s imagination.
I recommend watching this 9-minute video to learn more about the Warners. It has many archival musical clips, is richly illustrated with Frank’s photographs. Here is a hour-and-a-half video made by the Library of Congress’ Folklife Centre. In addition to the archival clips and photos it includes excerpts from Anne’s beautifully written journals and her book Traditional American Folksongs (now out-of-print and very expensive.) If you want just the bare facts you can go to Frank’s Wikipedia entry. (It is probably a sign of the times when they were active, and perhaps also a sign of our own times, that the couple’s musical collecting is generally attributed to Frank and not to both of them.)
In 1951 the Warners recorded the first version of The Snow is on the Ground from the singing of Eleazar Tillett who lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I got it from Vol. II of a 2-volume CD compilation the Warners’ field recordings compiled by their sons Gerret and Jeff and published by Jim Musselman’s Appleseed Recordings.
The second version is sung by Frank and Anne’s son Jeff Warner accompanied by Barbara Benn. Jeff is a travelling folk-singer and one of the few whose repertoire is mainly authentic traditional songs and tunes. I saw him at the Victoria Folk Music Society’s coffeehouse and it is from him that I bought the archival CDs.
The song is a variant of an English folksong that has been collected by various folklorists including separately by Percy Grainger and Sabine Baring-Gould from Lincolnshire, and Frank Kidson from Yorkshire. The song t is also found in several 19th century street ballad broadsides that were printed in Cheltenham, Birmingham, and London, attesting to how widespread the song must have been at that time.
Even before beginning my research on this song I recognized that it must be from Victorian times. It is clearly rooted in that mid-century’s Keep Christmas movement, perhaps even its early stages when many religious people still had puritan tendencies and memories that under a Puritan government the observance of the Christmas season had been forbidden as being offensive to God. Such people would have recognized the song’s reference to Paul’s words in Galatians 2:10 – “They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do..” (New King James translation)
This is a popular seasonal song among English folk-song traditionalists and I have several recordings of it. The names vary and include Remember the Poor, Pray Remember the Poor and Cold Winter has Come, but it is most commonly known as Time to Remember the Poor. I considered using one of the English variants here instead of Jeff’s interpretation of the same variant that his parents collected. But I thought that folks might enjoy an opportunity hear both an archival field recording of an elder and an interpretation of the same song by a seasoned professional performer.
I had been reluctant to include this song on any of the annual seasonal music Samplers that I made from 1994 to 2020 because its message is so somber. But I figure that in this songs-of-the-day format it might be suitable to have a day that features both this side of the season itself and of our seasonal music heritage.
