When the Rain Turns Into Snow: Holidays & Heartbreak in the Coldest Season 1916-1925
When the Rain Turns Into Snow: Holidays & Heartbreak in the Coldest Season 1916-1925
A seasonal collection of early recordings from around the world about lonely holidays, cold weather, seasonal depression, and the agony of wet socks in winter.
Plenty of compilations celebrate the joy and optimism of the wintertime holidays, but too few honor the other side of the season: the daylight that ends almost before it begins, the sidewalk slush, the heavy-footed exhaustion, the hangovers, grimly counting the days until the weather turns. The holiday experiences chronicled in these songs are as recognizable now as they were when they were first recorded, musical messages from hard times a century ago to hard times today.
From early American blues queens to Sicilian bagpipers, from Peruvian folk musicians to Romanian klezmer singers, the artists assembled here can all agree on one thing: the holidays can be rough. Whether you’re by yourself at home or all alone in a crowd, the songs here are as relatable today as they were 100 years ago. Most of these strange and wonderful tunes have never been reissued in any format since their original release as 78rpm records. Eccentric steel-guitar pioneer Sam Moore plays a melancholy holiday tune on an instrument of his own invention called the Octo-Chord; Romanian tenor Joseph Feldman sings a New Year’s tune that is mostly about cursing the year that just passed; an unknown group recorded in the Peruvian mountains plays a haunting song about a lover whose heart is colder than the snow on the Andes; the Virginia Female Jubliee Singers perform a haunting carol that sounds beamed in from outer space.
Whether you’re sneaking away from your family for a furtive nip of booze in the closet, dragging your feet across snowy sidewalks resenting the cozy people indoors, or forcing yourself to a party as a way of keeping your mind off your troubles, the songs here remind us that those feelings of holiday melancholy are nothing new or unique, and from the fjords of Sweden to the country roads of North Carolina, sometimes nothing helps better than hearing a song from long ago sung by someone who felt just the same way.
Each song has been remastered from the best available sources and pressed onto 140g vinyl, with a deluxe 4-page insert featuring rare photos and extensive liner notes about each song and performer.