“Lonesome Fiddle Blues” is a fiddle breakdown from Vassar Clements, registered for copyright in the names of Millie Clements and Vassar Clements. Its first part is in D Dorian and its second in D major. Clements, born in Kinard, Florida, in 1928, had auditioned for Bill Monroe in 1949 and fiddled on the Blue Grass Boys’ first Decca sessions in 1950. He later spent three years with Jim and Jesse’s Virginia Boys and, in 1967, a spell with Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys.
The tune first appeared on record on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the three-LP set the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville in August 1971 and United Artists released in November 1972. Clements leads on fiddle, with Jim Ibbotson and Randy Scruggs on guitars, John McEuen on banjo, Les Thompson on mandolin, Jimmie Fadden on harmonica, Ellis Padgett on bass and Jeff Hanna on washboard. The label credited the composition to Millie Clements. The album brought Clements to a far wider audience than two decades of band work had.
Other players took it up quickly. In December 1972 New Grass Revival (Sam Bush, Courtney Johnson, Curtis Burch and Ebo Walker) recorded a seven-minute version at the Starday studio in Nashville for the band’s first album. On 1 October 1973 Clements played it at the Boarding House in San Francisco with Old & In the Way (Peter Rowan, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and John Kahn). That performance stayed in the vaults until 1996, when it came out on That High Lonesome Sound. Clements recorded it again for his 1975 Mercury album Vassar Clements. In 1976 the fiddler Mark O’Connor included it on Pickin’ in the Wind for Rounder, backed by John Hartford, Norman Blake, Charlie Collins, Sam Bush and Roy Huskey Jr. A transcription from Clements’s playing appeared in David Brody’s Fiddler’s Fakebook in 1983.
The Fiddler’s Companion hears the tune in a much bigger record. It finds that the Charlie Daniels Band’s 1979 hit “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” “seems to have been largely based on” Clements’s breakdown. Clements died in August 2005 and was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
