“Lonesome Fiddle Blues” is a Vassar Clements original, written and first released by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their 1972 triple album Will the Circle Be Unbroken. The album was a watershed moment in country and bluegrass history, pairing the Dirt Band with the elder generation of country and bluegrass musicians (Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Maybelle Carter, Vassar Clements himself) for a cross-generational document of the older traditions.
Clements’s tune received its highest-profile bluegrass-era exposure in 1973 and after, when Clements joined the bluegrass supergroup Old & In the Way alongside Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and John Kahn. The group’s live performances of “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” were captured on the band’s self-titled live album, released in 1975, which introduced the tune to the cross-genre audience that Garcia’s involvement brought.
“Lonesome Fiddle Blues” has had a particularly visible second life: Charlie Daniels reworked the melody as the basis for “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” in 1979, giving Clements’s tune a kind of rock-radio echo that few other bluegrass instrumentals have received. Vassar Clements (1928–2005) went on to a long career as one of the most influential bluegrass fiddlers of his generation, and “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” remains his most-played composition.