New Moon Over My Shoulder cover

New Moon Over My Shoulder

Larry Sparks

Album · 2019 · Rebel REB 1870

New Moon Over My Shoulder is Larry Sparks’s 2019 album on Rebel Records (REB 1870), released on 19 July 2019. It was his first set of new music in five years and brought him back to Rebel, and it marks a half-century of touring with the Lonesome Ramblers, the band he formed in late 1969 after leaving Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys.

Roy Acuff’s “Down in Union County” opens the twelve tracks, with Michael Feagan on fiddle and Ron Stewart on banjo. The title song was written by Jimmie Davis in the 1940s and was a wartime hit for Tex Ritter; Sparks took his cue from Gene Autry’s recording. “Henry Hill,” by Gary Ferguson and Shane Sullivan, is sung by a Confederate soldier at Manassas to his sweetheart, and “Take Me Back to West Virginia” was the album’s first single. Three songs are re-recordings from Sparks’s own past: “I Only Exist,” which he first recorded with Stanley on the 1969 King album Hills of Home, and the gospel songs “New Highway” and “Green Pastures in the Sky,” the closing track.

The Lonesome Ramblers on the album are Feagan, Stewart, Jeff Clair and Evan Wilson on mandolin, and Matthew Madden on bass.

Tracklist

  1. 1 Down in Union County 2:33
  2. 2 I'm Really Leaving 2:24
  3. 3 Henry Hill 3:15
  4. 4 Take Me Back to West Virginia 3:15
  5. 5 New Highway alt version 3:30
  6. 6 I Was Wrong 2:39
  7. 7 Peacock Rag 1:54
  8. 8 There's a New Moon Over My Shoulder 2:58
  9. 9 I Only Exist alt version 3:15
  10. 10 Annie's Boy 4:32
  11. 11 Things Will Get Better 2:50
  12. 12 Green Pastures in the Sky 2:51

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