“Rosa Lee McFall” is a bluegrass song written and recorded by Charlie Monroe, the elder brother of Bill Monroe. Charlie and Bill had performed together as the Monroe Brothers before each went his own way; Charlie led his own band, the Kentucky Pardners, and recorded “Rosa Lee McFall” with them in 1949.
The song is a tender lament. Its narrator recalls Rosa Lee McFall, the sweetheart he loved and lost — in the lyric, a young woman taken by death — and the grief that her memory still brings. That gentle, sorrowful sentiment carried the song far beyond Charlie Monroe’s own recordings.
The song found a notably wide audience through the Grateful Dead, who recorded it on their 1981 acoustic album “Reckoning” and performed it often.
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