"The Snows They Melt the Soonest" (Roud 3154) is an English folk song dating back at least as far as 1821.
[1] The melody was printed in Bruce and Stokoe's Northumbrian Minstrelsy in 1882, which also mentioned its publication in 1821 and noted that the contributor of the song was Thomas Doubleday (1790–1870), who put it to a melody ("My Love is Newly Listed") learned from a Newcastle street singer.
[3] The singer Anne Briggs first popularized the song in the 1960s and recorded it in 1971.
It was later learned by Archie Fisher who passed it on to Dick Gaughan.
Gaughan recorded it on his Handful of Earth album, the success of which further popularized the song.