“They’re at Rest Together,” also known as “They Sleep Together Now at Rest” and, on some records, “T.B. Blues,” is credited to Walter Callahan of the Callahan Brothers. The brothers, Homer (Bill) and Walter (Joe) Callahan, natives of Madison County, North Carolina, recorded it in Dallas on 27 April 1941 with Paul Buskirk on mandolin, and Decca issued it that spring on 5952, paired with “Sweet Thing.”
The lyric is a short tuberculosis story. A boy and a girl love each other deeply, but she takes the “consumption.” She is carried up to the mountains to regain her health, and he sits by her bed, but the disease cannot be beaten. Then he dies as well, and the two are buried together in the mountains, with the closing thought that they are now at rest together.
Bluegrass bands took it up. The Lilly Brothers released it as “They Sleep Together Now at Rest” on a Page 78 in 1948. Bobby and Sonny Osborne recorded it in 1957 at the WWVA radio station in Wheeling, with Harley “Red” Allen. The Stanley Brothers were recorded singing it at New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, on 7 September 1958, Carter Stanley on lead and Ralph Stanley on tenor. The Country Gentlemen recorded it in February 1961 in Washington, D.C., with Charlie Waller on lead, John Duffey on tenor and Eddie Adcock on baritone, and it appeared that June on their Folkways LP Sing and Play Folk Songs and Bluegrass.
Alice Gerrard (then billed as Alice Foster) and Hazel Dickens recorded it in 1965 at Mastertone Studio in New York, with Gerrard on lead and guitar and Dickens on tenor and bass, Lamar Grier on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin and Billy Baker on fiddle. It was issued in 1973 on their Folkways album Won’t You Come and Sing for Me and reissued in 1996 on Pioneering Women of Bluegrass under the title “T.B. Blues (or They’re at Rest Together).” The Seldom Scene included it on Dream Scene (Sugar Hill, 1996).
