Nothing underscores the fleeting impermanence of life and love quite like a song that moves from marriage to death in two completely fucking depressing verses. That’s the case with Emmylou Harris’ bluegrass classic “Roses in the Snow,” recorded for her 1981 album of the same title and written by the otherwise obscure Ruth Franks. The narrative of “Roses in the Snow” is condensed so drastically that we cover the main bullet points of a life story in just under two and a half minutes. There aren’t many supporting details, and we don’t even know if the singer’s love died young or old; the song could really reflect the life of anyone who’s lost a spouse, which is country-music universality at its best. The nature symbolism in the lyrics is pretty universal too; in the first verse, the singer meets her love in the springtime (youth!), when all the flowers were in bloom (sexual fertility!). By the second verse, God has already taken her darlin’. Maybe it was a heart-wrenching tragedy, or maybe we’ve covered fifty years of wedded bliss in one verse. Whichever the case, this choice in story construction takes the old cliché about how “life goes by so fast” and pumps it full of methamphetamine. Rather than the melancholy sigh of an elderly person who has lived a full life, we are hearing HOLY SHIT IT IS FUCKING PANIC TIME WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE OR LOSE A LOVED ONE IN LIKE ONE MINUTE. Anyway, what are human lives but blinks of an eye in the grand scheme of cosmic time? What will human civilization have meant once conditions on our planet are no longer conducive to life as we know it? How the hell do I ever manage to leave my room without being paralyzed by anxiety?Yet the music remains irrepressibly upbeat even through the third and final verse, where the singer returns to her husband’s hillside grave to find the wild spring flowers blooming (full circle! life goes on! circle of life! etc.). She vows to leave a rose (love!) in the winter snow (death!) on his grave, and we have the depressing yet life-affirming moral of the story, which may as well be a European art-house flick: everything we do is done in the shadow of mortality, but we do it anyway. “Roses in the Snow” is poetic symbolism for “Love In the Face of Inevitable Doom,” and once we’ve understood and accepted that idea, there’s really nothing left to do but have a good old-fashioned bluegrass hoedown about it.
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