Musicians
- Jack Cooke — Guitar
- Bill Monroe — Mandolin
- Buddy Pennington — Banjo
- Bobby Hicks — Fiddle
- Charles Smith — Fiddle
- Bessie Lee Mauldin — Bass
“Stoney Lonesome” is an instrumental credited on record to Bill Monroe alone. Charles “Charlie” Smith, who played twin fiddle on Monroe’s 1959 recording of it, told Picker’s Guide how it came about: “Bill gave me a jump lick and asked me to write an instrumental using that.” An entry in Smith’s diary from the time says the two men wrote the tune together. Monroe named several tunes for places in southern Indiana near Bean Blossom, where he held his festival, among them “Brown County Breakdown” and “Road to Columbus,” and this one takes its name from Stony Lonesome, a small community in Bartholomew County. In a book of Indiana place names, Ronald Baker called the name “descriptive, as the locale was both stony and lonesome.” Every printed version of the tune spells it “Stoney.”
Monroe recorded it for Decca on 30 January 1959 at the Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville, with Bobby Hicks and Smith playing twin fiddles, Jack Cooke on guitar, Buddy Pennington on banjo and Bessie Lee Mauldin on bass. Smith’s diary, as reported by Peghead Nation, says Monroe used Bill Thomas’s F-12 mandolin that day while his own was at the Gibson factory for a tune-up. The recording stayed in the can until 1965, when Decca issued it on Bluegrass Instrumentals (DL 4601).
Kenny Baker recorded “Stoney Lonesome” on 29 March 1976 in Nashville for Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe (County 761), with Monroe himself on mandolin alongside Joe Stuart on guitar, Vic Jordan and Bob Black on banjo and Randy Davis on bass. Baker later told Smith that he had gone back to Smith’s 1959 recording before cutting the album, and said of it: “Boy, that’s the best fiddling you ever done!” Noam Pikelny included it on Noam Pikelny Plays Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe (Compass, 2013), with Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Ronnie McCoury on mandolin, Bryan Sutton on guitar and Mike Bub on bass.
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