Bury Me Beneath The Willow

A traditional American ballad first appearing in Henry Marvin Belden’s 1909 compilation “Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society” as “Under the Willow Tree.” The song tells the sorrowful story of someone whose lover has left them, often just before their wedding day, with the singer requesting to be buried beneath a willow tree in hopes their former love will remember them. The Carter Family recorded one of the earliest and most influential versions in 1927, with Maybelle Carter explaining that “we had sang [it] all our lives… we first heard the song at a family get-together.” The song has been attributed to Bradley Kincaid, though some sources suggest it predates him as a late-19th-century “heart song.” Multiple variations exist in the lyrics, particularly regarding pronoun usage – the Stanley Brothers notably sang it using male pronouns (“So he will know where I am sleeping”), while most versions use pronouns that match the singer’s gender. The song has been covered extensively, from Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford (1927) to modern artists like Ricky Skaggs and Tony Rice (1980). Recently, Molly Tuttle’s version was featured in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” soundtrack, demonstrating its continued relevance.