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At 11 o'clock next morning the new Speaker called the House to order for Joe Byrns's state funeral, recessed for an hour to await distinguished guests. Many Representatives stayed in their seats, talked quietly as the galleries filled. At 11:30 a U. S. Navy band struck up a muted tune in the Speaker's lobby. The House rose as a flag-draped coffin was rolled in, placed among the flowers piled high against the rostrum, opened. For half an hour Representatives, clerks, pages shuffled by it. Then Speaker Bankhead's gavel rapped again and tall, grey Chaplain James Shera Montgomery, in flowing cutaway, began a prayer. When it was over the rear door swung open and in marched the U. S. Senate, escorted by the House's testy Doorkeeper Joseph J. Sinnott. As Speaker Bankhead cracked his gavel summoning the House to rise for each new detachment of guests, Doorkeeper Sinnott hurried up & down the aisle, waved in the Diplomatic Corps and the Cabinet. Next came President Roosevelt on the arm of his military aide and last of all Mrs. Byrns, the late Speaker's two brothers and his only son, Joe Jr., 32. Behind a long black veil, plump Mrs. Byrns wept softly. Across the aisle from her in his front-row seat, President Roosevelt kept his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the coffin. Not even at the funeral of Senator Tom Walsh in 1933, thought observers, had he looked so sad.
After another prayer Michigan's Representative Louis C. Rabaut, to whose small, sweet tenor voice Joe Byrns had liked to listen, sang Absent and Thy Will Be Done. Leaning heavily on the rostrum, Speaker Bankhead declared in his soft Alabama drawl: "There were so tempered in the heart and soul of Joe Byrns elements of tolerance, patience and sympathy that he had drawn to him the ungrudging regard and affection of all men who came within the radius of his genial influence." Stumbling through his speech, Minority Leader Snell observed: "No worthier nor more dauntless friend nor foe than Joe Byrns ever smiled across yonder dividing aisle." Late that afternoon a funeral train, with 60 Representatives and 14 Senators aboard, rolled out of Washington, bearing all that was mortal of Joe Byrns back to Tennessee for a second funeral service. Ten minutes behind it in a special train rode President Roosevelt, accompanied by Secretary Hull and Postmaster General Farley. In Nashville next day they and 45,000 of Joe Byrns's homefolk paid a last tribute to the only Tennessean to be Speaker of the House since James K. Polk in 1839, laid him to rest in a cemetery eight miles from the grave of another famed Tennessee Democrat, Andrew Jackson.