I don't think it's about loyalty and infidelity. I'd say it's about misfortune -- the way of the world -- as usual leading inexorably to death. Clearly loyalty is not the operative factor here, since after all the singer canoodles the woman. Without the bad luck of the murder, not least to the victim (who otherwise hardly rates a mention in the song), for all we are led to believe the affair would have gone on. Public shame is the worst fate, but it is not the subject either. Death is. Shame is also an instrument of the tragedy.
The exaggerated, hammy, nearly operatic delivery of these songs is itself a bit of a goof -- as the web page linked to notes -- on the form. One way of making the tragic palatable -- like a lot of blues.
This is a short song but many more words have been written about much shorter verses.
As for my punctuation, I live by my own rules. If something looks stupid -- "Hitchens's, or Hitchenses' -- I don't use it. I stand by Hitchens'. Thats all folks.
mbs
. . . I do not think that LBV is a protest song or even a song about the injustices of the law. It's a song about loyalty and infidelity; the narrator will cheat on his best friend friend but not betray him to public shame, or perhaps it's his lover the best friend's wife who whom he will not betray, while she, in turn, will not speak to save her lover's life even as he remains silent to save her honor, or perhaps that of his best friend her husband, though she mourns her lover, wearing a LBV, and cries over his grave when the cold wind moans. Nothing in the song challenges the law or suggests an injustice rather than a tragedy. The law is simply the neutral instrument of the tragedy. The song is not a folk song, btw, in the sense that it was composed out of the oral tradition the way Pretty Polly or Love Henry was, but is clearly artfully commercial composed; I believe it is early country, though I don't know the author.
jks