Jim Lauderdale and Roland White

Lauderdale, then twenty-two, came to Nashville in 1979 hoping to meet two of his heroes, George Jones and Roland White; he had been taken with the Kentucky Colonels, the band White had led with his brother Clarence, and with White’s mandolin playing and singing. Lauderdale remembered introducing himself at the Station Inn, White thought they met at Opryland, but White, almost twenty years older, took him under his wing. The two first cut a three-song demo, and White then proposed a full record.

White assembled the band and the studio and produced the session, held in Scruggs’s basement with Earl’s son Steve Scruggs engineering. Lauderdale sang, and White played mandolin and guitar and sang, with Marty Stuart on lead guitar, Stan Brown on banjo, Johnny Warren on fiddle, Gene Wooten on Dobro and Terry Smith on bass. They cut twelve songs, mostly ones the two already knew in common, among them Reno & Smiley’s “(Stone Must Be the) Walls Built Around Your Heart” and several Delmore Brothers songs, along with two early Lauderdale originals. “Six White Horses,” “Nashville Blues,” “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar,” “Try and Catch the Wind” and “(That’s What You Get) For Loving Me” are also on the record.

Lauderdale shopped the record, but labels turned down an unknown singer who was not touring, and after about five months in Nashville he moved to New York. His first released album, Planet of Love, came out in 1991. Years later, with a record deal of his own, he suggested to White that they finally issue the 1979 album, only to find that each had assumed the other had the masters. The recording surfaced in the mid-2010s, when White’s wife found a rough mix on a reel-to-reel tape at the bottom of a box at home.

Yep Roc released Jim Lauderdale and Roland White on 3 August 2018, the same day as Lauderdale’s new album Time Flies. Lauderdale pointed out that what would have been his first record had become his thirtieth.