Long Black Veil (song)
"Long Black Veil" is a 1959 country ballad, written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin and originally recorded by Lefty Frizzell.
A saga song, "Long Black Veil" is told from the point of view of an executed man falsely accused of murder. He refuses to provide an alibi, since on the night of the murder he was having an affair with his best friend's wife, and would rather die and take their secret to his grave than admit the truth. The chorus describes the woman's mourning visits to his gravesite, wearing a long black veil and enduring a wailing wind.
Read more about Long Black Veil (song): Background, Success
Famous quotes containing the words long, black and/or veil:
“So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“... the Black woman in America can justly be described as a “slave of a slave.””
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this “truth,” a most welcome veil over a pudendum—and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)