Musicians
- Keith Whitley — Guitar
- Renfro Proffitt — Guitar
- Danny Marshall — Mandolin
- Ralph Stanley — Banjo
- "Curly" Ray Cline — Fiddle
- Jack Cooke — Bass
“I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)” was written by Pete Kuykendall in the late 1950s. Kuykendall was a Washington-DC-area banjoist and songwriter who would go on to co-found and edit Bluegrass Unlimited, the field’s flagship publication, for several decades; this is the song from his songwriting catalogue that has had the longest second life. The Country Gentlemen’s 1963 Folkways reading on Folk Session Inside is the earliest widely circulated recording.
Ralph Stanley recorded it in 1977 on his Clinch Mountain Gospel album, sharpening the song’s place in the bluegrass gospel canon. The Cox Family’s reading on the 2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack — produced by T Bone Burnett and winner of the 2002 Grammy Album of the Year — is the version most modern listeners know first. That soundtrack pulled the song from a working-bluegrass piece into the broad American-roots-music mainstream.
The lyric is a death-bed plea in the older Southern gospel tradition: the singer worn out, asking permission to lie down and rest, anticipating the heavenly home as a final relief. The harmonic shape is open and modal-flavoured, and the song’s natural slot is for a slow trio or quartet vocal with the lead phrase echoed in the chorus. It remains one of the most-covered modern bluegrass-gospel pieces.
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