Iris DeMent wrote “Let the Mystery Be” and placed it first on her debut album, Infamous Angel, released by Rounder’s Philo label in 1992 (PH 1138). Jim Rooney, who had helped her get the contract, produced the record. The musicians credited on the album include Mark Howard on acoustic guitar, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and mandolin, Al Perkins on dobro and Roy Huskey Jr. on bass, with DeMent singing and playing acoustic guitar. John Prine contributed to the liner notes. Within a year Warner Bros. had bought out her Rounder contract, and it reissued the album in 1993.
The song takes up the oldest questions: where people come from and what becomes of them when they die. In plain, homely language the verses run through the answers people give: that death is the end, that the dead come back in another form, that the faithful rest with the Savior, that some are bound for glory and others for purgatory. Some of these are treated with gentle humour. Since no one knows for certain, the singer says she believes in love, lives by it, and leaves the rest unanswered. DeMent grew up in a family that sang and played at Pentecostal services in Arkansas and California, and reviewers have called the song an agnostic hymn, the work of a writer who kept the gospel music of her upbringing but set aside its dogma.
The song was used in the opening sequence of the film Little Buddha, starring Keanu Reeves. 10,000 Maniacs performed it for their 1993 MTV Unplugged session with David Byrne as guest singer and guitarist, and Elektra issued that take on the band’s “Few and Far Between” CD single the same year. Two decades later it accompanied the opening titles of the second season of HBO’s The Leftovers in 2015, a montage of family photographs in which the vanished appear as silhouettes.
