“O, Death” by Lloyd Chandler

At the 2002 Grammy Awards, pioneer of American bluegrass music, vocalist and banjo player Dr. Ralph Edmund Stanley performed an Appalachian dirge called “O, Death.” The song appeared on the acclaimed soundtrack to the equally acclaimed Coen brothers’ film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou.” His performance of the song on the film’s soundtrack won Stanley the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance.

According to articles featured in a 2004 issue of Indiana University Press’s The Journal of Folklore Research, “O, Death” was written by a Free Will Baptist preacher from Madison Country, North Carolina named Lloyd Chandler. One of the articles was authored by folklorist Carl Lindahl, who researched claims from Western North Carolina that the song was composed by Lloyd Chandler. The article states that Chandler authored the song after a vision from God in 1916.

Chandler performed the song, originally called “A Conversation with Death,” for several years while preaching in Appalachia. It’s the song of a desperate, ill person begging Death to spare them.

The refrain of the song is the simple plea:

O, Death
O, Death
Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year

There are no recordings of Lloyd Chandler singing “Conversations with Death.” Bluegrass banjo player Dock Boggs recorded the song in the late 1920s, and a recording from the 1938 National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. is on file with the Library of Congress.  Various folk artists included “O, Death” on musical collections throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It’s featured in the Academy Award-winning 1976 Barbara Kopple documentary “Harlan Country, USA,” about the coal miners’ “Brookside Strike.”

At first, T Bone Burnett, who produced the “O, Brother, Where Art Thou” soundtrack, asked Ralph Stanley to perform a banjo-focused version of “O, Death” emulating Dock Boss, but Stanley convinced him otherwise with an a cappella rendition in the style of Appalachian Primitive Baptist Universalist Church  congregants, also known as “No-Hellers.” That small Baptist sub-denomination does not believe in hell, but instead believe heaven will be an egalitarian eternity experienced by everyone.

Watch Ralph Stanley’s stunning live rendition of “O, Death” here: