Take Me Back (Sugar Hill SH 3766, 1988) is the first of three albums that Tim and Mollie O’Brien made together for Sugar Hill, followed by Remember Me (1992) and Away Out on the Mountain (1994). The two had begun singing together as a duo in high school in Wheeling, West Virginia, and reunited for a Mother’s Day concert in 1984; the album came four years later. Tim was then a member of Hot Rize.
It was recorded at Colorado Sound Recording in Denver. Tim O’Brien plays guitar, mandolin, octave mandolin and fiddle, and Nick Forster, who is credited with slide guitar, flat-picked guitar, clawhammer banjo and dulcimer, accompanies him. The thirteen songs are mostly traditional: “Leave That Liar Alone,” “Sweet Sunny South,” “Down to the Valley to Pray,” “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” and “Christ Was Born in Bethlehem” among them. The others include A. P. Carter’s “When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland,” the Lefty Frizzell and Jim Beck song “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” and John Prine and Rob Braddock’s “Unwed Fathers.”
Tracklist
- 1 Take Me Back 3:37
- 2 Down to the Valley to Pray alt version
- 3 Leave That Liar Alone alt version
- 4 Sweet Sunny South alt version
- 5 Your Long Journey alt version 2:45
