“Annabelle Lee” is Sarah Jarosz’s musical setting of “Annabel Lee,” the last complete poem by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1849 and published shortly after his death. Poe’s poem tells of a love so strong that even the angels envied it, and of the young woman’s death in a “kingdom by the sea.”
Jarosz adapted the poem with a co-writer, Cameron Scoggins, keeping much of Poe’s language while shaping it into a song. She recorded it for her second album, Follow Me Down, released in 2011. Her arrangement sets the text against clawhammer banjo and a modal, haunted melody, with Dan Tyminski adding a counterpoint vocal line.
The recording is a clear example of how the contemporary bluegrass and acoustic scene has reached beyond traditional sources for material, here turning a canonical nineteenth-century poem into a piece of modern string-band music without losing the eerie atmosphere Poe built into the original.
