I’m no ethnomusicologist. I’m not even a mixologist or any other kind of “ologist,” but lyrics interest me, and sometimes I like going a little deeper into some of the mysteries presented in the bluegrass standards we know and love.
Many people just let the cryptic or confusing parts of these songs go, as I did for many years, just figuring that there’s probably a logical explanation they just don’t happen to know. Or some just don’t care, taking the “I like the mandolin break that’s coming up” kind of attitude.
But what if you found out there were lost verses that explain some of these lyrical mysteries? What if those verses were discovered after all these years and were made public for the first time?
Verses might get lost for a variety of reasons, but it usually involved some guy singing the song somewhere in Northern Ireland in 1831 and just drawing a blank when it came time for the eighth verse. He had sung a lot of verses already, and there were still four more to go, so he figured that was good enough. Someone else learned the song from him, and by the time it made it across the ocean, that critical verse eight that so nicely explained verse seven was gone forever.
In the case of more modern bluegrass songs, it may simply be a case of a page being forgotten at home, or someone failing to turn over a lyric sheet in the studio.
Well I have very good news about all of this: it turns out that some of these verses aren’t really lost after all. Thanks to a research project by Professor William C. Woertergraber (pronounced “O’Reilly”), author of Little Willie Was as Bad as You Think: An In-depth Look at 19th Century Murder Ballads, newly discovered verses have come to light and through a special arrangement (that mostly involved money and some radio shoutouts for his mother), I’m able to show you these lost verses.
Here are just a few:
In the Pines
Have you ever wondered why the captain just threw his watch away for no apparent reason in the second verse? I always just figured a train that took three hours to pass would be a little frustrating and he’d rather not know the time. All is explained in the missing third verse:
Well the captain had joined a religious cult
And a timepiece was taboo
To chuck his watch from the boxcar door
Seemed like the thing to do
So there. He was getting rid of the watch which was strictly forbidden by the Apocalyptic Brotherhood of the Shining Lamp (ABSL). I’m sure it was the right thing for him to do at the time to avoid being shunned.
Old Home Place
This is a more contemporary song, written by Mitch Jayne and Dean Webb of the Dillards, and popularized by J.D. Crowe & the New South, but there are more than a couple of unanswered questions about it. For one thing, in the second verse there’s that whole business of “the tariffs” taking his pay. Well, now that we’re here in 2025 and tariffs are all the rage, this just turns out to be a very forward-thinking song. It all makes sense now. When the song first came out, people’s only association with tariffs were the Smoot Hawley tariffs of 1930, which also didn’t mean much to a lot of people. Smoot Hawley, if you don’t know, was an early country star with the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago, known for the song, The Blue Tariff Boogie.
What has always perplexed me is the unanswered question in the chorus:
And why did I leave my plow in the field and look for a job in the town?
There are a few logical explanations for looking for the job in the town, and in fact a lot of farmers will leave their plows in the field, usually just parking them in the corner of the field until next spring. What I don’t get is why the singer doesn’t know himself why he left it there. We now have an answer in the long-forgotten verse five. It also begins with “Well . . .”
Well we used to have an implement shed
But the storms blew it off the ground
And that’s why I left my plow in the field
When I quit the farm and moved to town
Perhaps this was a bridge. Or perhaps Dean and Mitch just omitted it because the word “implement” is a little clunky to sing, but unfortunately they left us with a song in which the singer doesn’t even know why he acted the way he did.
Pretty Polly
This one has puzzled me for years. For those who don’t know the song, it’s a classic murder ballad, and one of the only bluegrass songs that earns a listener discretion advisory for graphic violence and nudity. The mysterious part, though, is in the very last verse in which Little Willie, after murdering Pretty Polly, walks into the jailhouse, confesses to the crime then announces that he’s “trying to get away.” It’s understood that Little Willie isn’t the most balanced individual to begin with—what with the insecurity-driven homicide and all—but confessing to the law in person and then announcing that you’re making a run for it is a whole other level of eccentricity, not to mention a very poor escape strategy.
I’m happy to say now that it’s all making more sense to me after seeing this newly unearthed verse. It turns out it was all even more sinister and premeditated than we thought: the jailer was in on it, and Little Willie was just letting him know that the job was done and that now he was running. The hope was that the jailer would hold his pursuers back as long as possible, maybe by giving them burdensome paperwork to fill out before chasing Willie, or by maybe just pointing west, knowing that Little Willie had run east.
The verse:
Now that the jailer knows the deed is done
Now that the jailer knows the deed is done
He’ll stall the sheriff’s deputies while I make my run
Be expecting a sequel to this column at some point. Maybe we’ll find out what the first verse of Wildwood Flower actually means, or maybe even discover a verse that will solve forever the Angelina/Angeline the Baker controversy.
