The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers were organized in the coalfield and mountain country of southwestern Virginia, taking their name from the landscape of the region they called home. Based around Norton and the surrounding WNVA broadcast area, the group built their audience through live radio work during the late 1940s, when such programs still served as the primary medium connecting regional country and string band music to home listeners across rural Appalachia. Their recording career began on small independent labels before they moved to the majors, and their trajectory from Cozy Records to RCA Victor traces the path many regional bluegrass acts followed as the genre gained national recognition in the early 1950s.

The 1950 Cozy sides — "Pain in My Heart" backed with "Lonesome, Sad and Blue" (Cozy 232/233) — represent the group in their early recording period, working within the emerging bluegrass style that Bill Monroe and his contemporaries had established. By 1954, when they recorded "Windy Mountain" and "There's Just One You" for RCA Victor (20-5979), they had achieved the distribution and visibility that a major label brought. "Windy Mountain" in particular became one of the better-known recordings associated with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, and the song entered the broader bluegrass repertoire.

Curly Ray Cline, whose fiddling would later make him a recognizable figure across the bluegrass world — including his long tenure with Ralph Stanley — was a central member of the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers for much of their active years. The group's recordings document the regional bluegrass scene of Virginia at a moment when the genre was consolidating its identity, and their work on both independent and major labels gives a picture of how that scene functioned at different levels of the recording industry.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.