Here's a quote from Danny Dill

"I got on a kick with Burl Ives songs—those old songs—but I –didn't know any, and I had no way to find any at the time, or was too lazy I said, 'I'll write me a folksong' - an instant folksong, if you will So I worked on it for months, and then it all came to me. There's three incidents I've read about in my life that really please me. There was a Catholic priest killed in New Jersey many years ago under a town hall light, and there was no less than 50 witnesses. They never found a motive. They never found the man. Until this day, it's an unsolved murder. That always intrigued me, so that's "under the town hall light." Then the Rudolph Valentino story's always impressed me—about the woman that always used to visit his grave. She always wore a long black veil—now there's the title for the song. And the third component was Red Foley's "God Walks These Hills With Me." I always thought that was a great song, so I got that in there, too. I just scrambled it all up, and that's what came out.

(from Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy, by Dorothy Horstman, ©1975, 1986, 1996 by Country Music Foundation Press). The song was published in 1959.
-Joe Offer-