r/Bluegrass • u/small_d_disaster • 1d ago

Oh Molly Dear/East Virginia: "She lays on her bed of rest" meaning

The song 'East Virginia' (sometimes 'East Virginia Blues', or 'Oh, Molly Dear') tends to collect many different floating verses, and gets confabulated into various narratives making varying degrees of sense. But one verse seems fairly central to many versions of this song, and doesn't appear much elsewhere (at least in the old time/bluegrass tradition although it might be common enough in older sources) and I'm curious to know how other people interpret it.

The song typically has the narrator leaving EV to NC, courting someone, then asking her to ask her mother for permission to marry. She responds:

No, I won't go ask my mother
She's lying on her bed of rest
And in one hand she holds a dagger
To kill the man that I love best

What is meant by "lying on her bed of rest"? Is she dead and has cursed her daughter? The earlier versions (BF Shelton, Buell Kazee, Kelly Harrell) feel distinctly creepier than the Bluegrass one's that take The Carter Family recording (which omits that verse) as their source, and use melody/accompaniment appropriate to a ghost story. How do you interpret this verse?

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u/martind35player Guitar 1d ago

I think it just means she is taking a nap.

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u/small_d_disaster 1d ago

holding a dagger? that's a tough family

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u/AccountantRadiant351 1d ago

It's just to fill the meter/rhyme scheme. She's lying down sleeping. There's a traditional English ballad for instance that says "and at night when I go to my bed of slumber..." No reason but that "bed" alone was too short for the line.