Bury Me Beneath the Willow

Nobody knows who wrote Bury Me Beneath the Willow. It was an American folk song before anybody recorded it: Henry Marvin Belden's list of songs gathered by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society in 1909 has it as Under the Willow Tree, and folklorists file it as Roud 410. The story is the one the title promises. The singer's love has gone, and all that is left to ask for is a grave under the willow, where the one who left might come and weep.

The Carter Family made it famous. It was among the songs they recorded at the Bristol sessions in 1927, as Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow, and the same year Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford cut it too. The Monroe Brothers recorded it in 1937 as Weeping Willow Tree, the Delmore Brothers in 1938, and it came through into bluegrass as one of the first songs a beginner jam calls. Tony Rice and Ricky Skaggs recorded it together in 1980.

The Idaho Bluegrass Association calls its chords the most common progression in bluegrass: G, C, G, D, then G, C, G and D, G. The same page lists Wreck of the Old 97 among the standards that share it, so learning these changes pays twice. The verse and the chorus use the same changes and nearly the same tune, and the difference is the first note. The verse starts on the B. The chorus starts a third higher, on the d, which is what makes it sound like the chorus even when the words are the ones everybody already knows.

On a mandolin in G the melody sits between the open D course and the d at the fifth fret of the A course and never leaves first position. The work is in the long notes, the held B and d that open each line and the A under the D chord, and a slow, even tremolo on each is how the song sounds sung. The two short walks at the end of the fourth and eighth bars are the start of a break, and they are there to be changed.