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The Long Black Veil

music by Marijohn Wilkin

words by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin

MANY PEOPLE HAVE TAKEN ‘The Long Black Veil’ to be a folk song. It isn’t, but there could be no greater compliment, and performances by Sammi Smith and Johnny Cash, Joan Baez and Mick Jagger (with the Chieftains), Nick Cave and Gillian Welch, have only added to the impression of its folkloric origins. In fact, the song was written by a pair of Nashville pros in 1959 and it revived the stalled career of Lefty Frizzell, a pioneering figure in country music. Frizzell’s open, honest voice was an influence on the likes of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson; it was a particularly apt choice for ‘The Long Black Veil’, a song that unblinkingly stares fate in the face and asks no sympathy of its listeners.

The singer of the song is dead, hanged for a murder he did not commit. He had an alibi but was honour-bound not to produce it, because at the time of the murder he was ‘in the arms’ of his ‘best friend’s wife’ (were this really a folk song, it would be his brother’s wife). The woman in question now visits his grave ‘when the night winds wail’, disguised in the black veil of the title, and ‘nobody knows’ but the dead man himself.

Like ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Red Headed Stranger’, the song wraps dark lyrics in a cheerful tune. There’s really nothing special about the melody of the verse or the chords that go with it, but the chorus (‘She walks these hills in a long black veil’) has some distinction, and the yearning tagline (‘Nobody knows, nobody sees, / Nobody knows but me’) is the clincher, the melodic line rising like those wailing ‘night winds’ with Frizzell adding a hint of a yodel and Don Helms’s pedal steel supplying a tasteful background moan. Perhaps this was the cue for Nick Cave’s version of the song with the Bad Seeds, though it seems more likely Cave was responding to The Band’s recording on their first album, Music from Big Pink, with Rick Danko’s quavering, querulous vocals. The Band wasn’t taking the song entirely seriously, and neither was Cave. But Johnny Cash was.

Possibly because he was the self-styled ‘man in black’, Cash staked his claim early to ‘The Long Black Veil’ and today it is most closely associated with him. He made his first recording for the album Orange Blossom Special in 1965 and sang it in 1968 during his concerts at Folsom Prison. On the ensuing album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, we hear him get the giggles after the line ‘I had been in the arms of my best friend’s wife’ (‘Did I hear someone applaud?’ he laughs). The following year, he sang it as a duet with Joni Mitchell on his TV show, and it remained a staple of his repertoire until the end of his career. On Cash’s posthumously released Unearthed recordings for producer Rick Rubin, it is track one.

Cash’s vocal timbre adds all the musical darkness the tune itself lacks, his hollow tones making us believe that ‘the scaffold is high and eternity’s near’. But there’s not a hint of melodrama. This is a hallmark of the folk singer’s art and it was Cash’s usual approach: let the story tell itself.

Another feature of the song’s history that links it to folk tradition is the way it has been sung, unchanged, by so many women. Not only Baez and Welch, but Marianne Faithfull, Roseanne Cash and a swathe of female country singers. Even the avant-garde soprano sfogato, Diamanda Galas, has recorded it in a version that makes Nick Cave’s seem demure. But they all sang the song from the man’s point of view. In commercial music, lyrics are routinely altered to maintain the presumed heterosexuality of the performer: ‘And then he kissed me’, sang the Crystals; ‘And then I kissed her’, sang the Beach Boys. But folk song – at least in the Celtic, British and Appalachian traditions – is different. The point of view may be fluid within a song, switching from the third person to the first and back again as readily as it flips from past tense to present. A man may sing from the point of view of a ‘maid that’s true in love’; a female singer may become a sadistic brute of a ship’s captain.

One female singer who bucked this trend was the composer of ‘The Long Black Veil’, Marijohn Wilkin, who, in 1961, two years after Lefty Frizzell’s recording, made her own, though it wasn’t released for more than thirty years. Entitled ‘My Long Black Veil’, Wilkin’s recording presents the song from the woman’s point of view, but in most other respects the song is unchanged.

Another recording from 1961 was by Burl Ives, and this was significant. Ives’s recording career had been devoted almost entirely to American folk songs, including a fair few murder ballads such as ‘Frankie and Johnny’. Danny Dill’s initial spur to write ‘The Long Black Veil’ had been Ives’s singing, and while he was aware Ives specialised in traditional material, he believed he might be able to write something in the same idiom. Ives’s recording of Dill and Wilkin’s song was proof, then, of their success. It was, in Dill’s own words, ‘an instant folk song’.