The lyric is a night-long vigil. The singer waits up for a woman who does not come home, falls asleep at daybreak to drive the blues away, and then hears her talking in her sleep about somebody new. His response is to pretend he heard nothing: he will go on as though he could never love anyone else. Only in the last verse does he put the question directly — how can you treat me like you do, when I have never done you wrong — and the answer he gives is the kind of ruined devotion Carter Stanley wrote better than almost anyone. His heart will always worship her, and still each night he is left alone.

The song has stayed in the tradition ever since. Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs recorded it in June 1971, both of them seventeen years old, for Rebel’s Second Generation Bluegrass, with Whitley taking Carter’s lead and Skaggs the tenor above him. The Seldom Scene put it on Act 4 in 1979; Ralph Stanley came back to it in the mid-1980s with Charlie Sizemore singing lead; and Dan Tyminski recorded it for his 1996 solo debut, The Stanley Tradition.