Down in the Willow Garden

Down in the Willow Garden is a murder ballad, also sung as Rose Connelly, after the girl it is about. The singer is a young man facing the gallows for killing her, and the verses say how he did it. The song most likely began in Ireland in the nineteenth century and settled in the United States. Cecil Sharp found it in Virginia and North Carolina in 1918, and a count published in 1979 found seventy one versions.

G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter recorded it for Victor in the late 1920s, and Charlie Monroe's record of 1947 is the one that made it popular. After that it belonged to bluegrass. The Stanley Brothers recorded it twice in the 1950s, Flatt and Scruggs and Reno and Harrell cut it too, and the Everly Brothers put it on Songs Our Daddy Taught Us in 1958. Art Garfunkel sang it in 1973, and Holly Hunter sings it as a lullaby in the film Raising Arizona.

The verse is four lines of eight bars. The first line climbs to a long high d and then falls to a long low E over an E minor, and the second comes home to G. The third line is the one that starts high, on the e and the g, and the fourth is the second again. Three chords go under it: G, E minor and D.

On a mandolin this is a tremolo waltz. Nearly every line has a note held for a whole bar: the high d, the low E at the end of the first and third lines, the G that closes the second and fourth. Pick each once at first to hear how long it rings, then fill it with an even tremolo and stop cleanly before the short notes after it. The fills in the gaps are written light on purpose, so the song stays in front.