Friday Five: Songs About The Cold

Hopefully you’ve all escaped the various snowstorms of the past couple weeks unscathed. Here’s a Friday Five guaranteed to lift your spirits: songs about freezing to death. Don’t worry, folks; spring is just around the corner. (Thanks to Ken Morton, Jr. for the idea.)

• 5. “Crawl Through Snow” – O’Death

  These Gothic Country Brooklynites are a little bit folk, a little bit punk. On this rockin’ song from Broken Hymns, Limbs, and Skin, lead singer Greg Jamie is barely comprehensible as he sings about slowly freezing to death. But who expects a frozen guy to enunciate clearly anyway?

• 4. “Deep Water, Ice And Snow (Album Version)” – Don Edwards

  Being a cowboy in the winter must really suck, especially when you have to move a thousand heads of cattle across a river in the dead of winter. Thanks to his horse, the narrator survives—many of his companions don’t—but he’s seen a version of hell that’s “mighty cold.”

• 3. “Wildfire” – Michael Martin Murphey

  Murphey’s biggest hit is a little—okay, a lot—cheesy, but don’t act like you don’t know all the words to this song about a girl and her pony, lost in a killing frost.

• 2. “Jacob’s Dream” – Alison Krauss

  This mournful tale about a pair of young boys who freeze to death in the mountains will make you long for a less depressing Krauss song, like “Whiskey Lullaby.” The clip below features the songwriters, Julie Lee and John Pennell, discussing the inspiration behind the song. Though the story told in “Jacob’s Dream” sounds like fiction, the tragedy of the Lost Children of the Alleghenies—and the farmer who dreamed of their location—is sadly true.

• 1. “The Blizzard” – Jim Reeves

  This single (from Tall Tales and Short Tempers) went to #4 in 1961, which means a whole lot of folks dug a song about a guy who freezes to death a hundred yards from his sweetheart’s house because he couldn’t leave his lame horse. Scottish indie pop band Camera Obscura recently released a pretty excellent cover if you’re into that sort of thing.