Campfire Songs: Learn to Play “Oh, the Dreadful Wind and Rain”

“Oh, the Dreadful Wind and Rain” is a traditional folk ballad with roots tracing back to the mid-17th century. Like many songs passed down orally for generations before the era of recording, it has appeared under various titles, with small shifts in melody and lyrics. But the core story has remained—and it’s a dark one. Over the years, it’s been memorably recorded by artists such as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, each bringing their own spin to the ballad’s eerie tale.

This is a classic murder ballad with a supernatural twist. Two sisters vie for the same man’s affection. When he chooses one, the other, consumed by jealousy, drowns her sibling. A musician finds the body and crafts a fiddle from her bones and hair. Hauntingly, the instrument plays only one tune: “Oh, the Dreadful Wind and Rain.”

Over the centuries, the details have varied. The suitor might be a knight or a miller’s son. The sisters are sometimes described as older and younger, or dark and fair. In some versions, the fiddle reveals the crime at the murderer’s wedding. But the essential elements—sororicide and a haunted instrument—have endured, and that’s just good music.

The structure of the tune is a repeating ten-bar progression. We’re playing it in the key of A major, using just a handful of easy, open-position chords. While bluegrass players often strum this with a flatpick, this arrangement takes a fingerstyle folk approach, with the thumb handling the down-stemmed bass notes and the index and middle fingers picking the melody and harmony above.

The intro features a simple hammer-on figure (shown in notation) that also reappears between verses for added color. In bar 3, on the G chord, I hold the D note on the second string (third fret) to create a smooth voice-leading connection to the D chord that follows.

The second half of the form (bars 5–10) begins with another A–D move. But instead of the usual G–D5–A turnaround, I use an ascending sequence: Em–D/F#–G–A. By skipping the high E string and placing the F# in the bass, we get a subtle but distinctive rising bass line—an easy way to add forward motion to an otherwise gentle, flowing progression.