Beeswing

Thompson wrote Beeswing alone, and it first appeared on an album with Mirror Blue in 1994. The narrator is a young man infatuated with a free-spirited co-worker at a factory. She leaves after an argument, and he later hears that she has fallen on hard times. Wikipedia describes it as a tale of the prices that she and the young man who falls for her pay for their choices, and it has come to be regarded as one of Thompson's best compositions.

His own account of its source has two sides. His memoir, as reported on Wikipedia, says the woman is based on the folk singer Anne Briggs, whom he did not know personally but heard about from their mutual friend Sandy Denny. Asked in the Guardian in October 2026, he said it was more complicated. When he lived in Suffolk in the 1970s a tramp used to come by for odd jobs, and his stories were part of the song. The Guardian's review of the memoir names him as Ted, a former stable boy. Thompson added that Denny's sense of Briggs as a free spirit fed in too, and that he deserves credit as a writer of fiction because the song is not about anybody. American Songwriter likewise describes it as an original story blending a man who visited Thompson and Linda in the 1970s with performers such as Briggs.

The Christian Science Monitor called it a minstrel ballad sure to seep into the listener's heart. Thompson later wrote that he had no idea where the tale was going as he was writing it, and the song gave his 2021 memoir its title. Pitchfork named it, with Gethsemane, among the peaks of his repertoire in 2009.

Live and covers

It has become a staple of his concerts. Reviewing a 2024 show at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Peter Ross of The Times called Beeswing, played alone on fingerpicked acoustic, the best of the night, and said the brief silence after it said more than applause. Thompson re-recorded it solo in 2014 for Acoustic Classics, where it runs 5:42. Christy Moore has also recorded it.

Both uploads in the hypersongs web are studio recordings of the song, posted on his auto-generated channel.