“Big Country” is credited to Vernon Derrick and Jimmy Martin. Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys recorded it for Decca on 22 November 1966 at Bradley’s Barn in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. Derrick, who had played fiddle on Martin’s 1965 sessions, played mandolin on this one. Buddy Spicher played fiddle, J. D. Crowe banjo, Martin guitar and Bill Yates bass, with Len “Snuffy” Miller on drums. The same day the band cut “Crow on the Banjo” and Spicher and Martin’s “Going Up Dry Branch.”
Decca issued “Big Country” in May 1967 as a single, Decca 32132, backed with the vocal “Living Like a Fool.” In June it opened the LP Big and Country Instrumentals, which drew on Martin sessions going back to 1963.
Derrick, born in Grant, Alabama, in 1933 and a resident of Arab, Alabama, from 1941, was a member of Martin’s band from 1964 to 1970. He also wrote “The Arab Bounce” during those years, and Martin recorded it on Free Born Man in 1969. A live recording made at Watermelon Park, Berryville, Virginia, in 1969, and issued in 2015 on Live ’69 & ’71, has Derrick again on mandolin in “Big Country.” On his own 1980 LP Plays Jimmy Martin’s Hottest Hits, with Martin on guitar, Derrick recorded it once more, playing both fiddle and mandolin.
Other bands took it up as well. Rual Yarbrough recorded it for Banjo Gentleman (1981). Adam Steffey put it on his mandolin album Grateful (2001), and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver on A School of Bluegrass (2004). The Grassland Bluegrass Band included it on Old Old House (2015), and the dobro player Donnie Scott on Donnie Dobro’s Ride (2018).
