Oh Death

The song is generally credited to Lloyd Chandler, a Baptist preacher who sang it as “A Conversation with Death” in the 1920s, but it was probably taken or adapted from older material. Personified Death appears in traditional English songs, including “Death and the Lady,” and the song resembles an Irish broadside printed in 1870, “A Dialogue Between Death & the Sinner.” A version sung in 1908 was printed in the Journal of American Folklore in 1913. Dock Boggs recorded it in 1963, after folk-revival audiences rediscovered him, and Chandler’s own recording is on Rounder’s 1975 collection High Atmosphere.

The Stanley Brothers recorded it at King Studio in Cincinnati on 1 April 1964, credited on the session to John Reedy, who had recorded it for Starday in 1961, with Carter Stanley singing lead and Ralph Stanley on banjo and singing lead and tenor, Earl Taylor on mandolin, George Shuffler on guitar and Vernon McIntyre on bass. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it again on 12 May 1977 at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, for the Rebel album Clinch Mountain Gospel, and Stanley sang it unaccompanied on the soundtrack of the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack’s producer, had asked for a banjo version in the style of Dock Boggs; Stanley persuaded him to use an a cappella performance instead. The recording won Stanley the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. In 2001 he sang it with Gillian Welch on the album Clinch Mountain Sweethearts.