The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

So I went back to bluegrass. Any port in a storm, and things had gotten pretty damn stormy by then. I’d spent a lot more than I’d saved, and what I had saved I’d put into dumbass investments. I played guitar with Doyle Lawson for a time, doing the festival and church circuit, and finally started my own group, Billy Lincoln and the Blue Mountaineers. We did okay, got a contract with Rounder, where a lot of the best bluegrass acts were, and sold enough CDs to hang on.

We did “Mother Come Quickly,” not like the ballad version the folkies did, but more up-tempo, driving bluegrass, the way Monroe did it. In fact, let me do it now, just so you can hear what the song was like for the first seventy or so years, before the last part… came along, so to speak. I’ll do it like a ballad, because I want the words to stick out, and because that’s how I’m gonna do it tomorrow night.…

    I come from a lovin’ family
    That lives where the two creeks meet.
    One day from the east a young man came
    Who wooed me with words so sweet.
    He found me in my dark holler,
    Brought sunshine to my night,
    Wove daisies and violets through my hair,
    He was my heart’s delight.
    Mother come quickly, Father come quickly,
    Brother and Sister, see.
    The only man I ever did love
    Is hanging in front of me.

Now that’s the first verse and the chorus, so right off the bat you know something bad’s gonna happen. It goes on…

    Oh, the days passed by and still he came
    And he asked me to be his wife,
    But my family told me I never must be
    Wed any day of my life.
    You are a lovin’ daughter,
    My father said to me,
    But before you wed I’ll see him dead
    And hangin’ in front of thee.

So now you got your paternal opposition, and right away you know the kids are gonna get into this, because whatever their parents want, hell, they want the opposite too. But now weird shit starts happening…

    They found a girl beside the creek,
    A knife had pierced her through.
    And the blade stuck fast within her breast
    Belonged to my love so true.
    He was not guilty of the crime,
    Nor would he run away,
    For the threat of hanging scared him not
    And with me he would stay.

Okay, now we got a dead girl in the picture, and she’s stabbed by this gal’s lover’s knife. Only he didn’t do it. She says he was not guilty of the crime. I always thought maybe he told her he didn’t and she believed him, or maybe she knew some other way. Still, guilty or not, she wants him to get out of there, because she loves him, she doesn’t want to see him hang…

    I begged him to go and save his dear life,
    But alas he would not flee.
    With the moon in the sky they hung him on high,
    And the guilt sat hard on me.
    Mother, come quickly, Father, come quickly…

…and blah blah blah, final chorus. Up till now. She loved this fella, her dad didn’t approve, so maybe Dad framed him with his knife and got him hung, and the girl feels guilty about it. But you notice something? The last verse only has four lines, not like the other ones that have eight.

That’s where the rumor got started that there was more to the song than what everybody knew. When it got hot with the folkies in the early sixties was when the rumor really started growing. There was this story that A. P. Carter of the Carter Family had found the whole thing but wouldn’t sing it, and some folks claimed they’d heard Mother Maybelle confirm it, but I think that’s bullshit. But Roger Waitkus — that’s the old guy who first collected it way long ago — he never said nothing. Never even said where he got it other than that it was Appalachian traditional or some such.