Taste Test: Stephen Artemis Jr. unearths Appalachian murder in new song, ‘Cold Rain and Snow’
The musician stages a grotesque murder scene with a new song.
Welcome to Taste Test, a song/video review series of SubmitHub-only gemstones
The Appalachians impose a dark, haunted and perhaps tormented presence. Emerald-speckled hills dazzle in the sunlight, atop lonesome towns and villages far down below, and the cold severely descends at dusk. What lies in the midnight hours is only of great mystery. Brooklyn guitar-slinger, harmonica player and singer-songwriter Stephen Artemis Jr. peers through the annals of time and excavates a tale originally found within the pages of Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp’s 1917 compilation English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Artemis Jr.’s voice is matched in both stomach-turning provocativeness and the macabre glisten by his guitar, which slices the flesh from bone, and the harmonica that glides up from the bloody ruin. “Well, she come down the stairs / Holding back her long, yellow hair / And her cheeks, they were red as a rose,” he permits the images to fall as ash on the gruesome scene. You’ll be unnerved, as much as enthralled by such gothic folklore.
Listen below:
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