“Stoney Lonesome” is an instrumental Bill Monroe wrote with his fiddler Charlie Smith. Monroe recorded it in 1959 with twin fiddles, and it was released a few years later on a collection of his instrumentals.
A bluesy, wild-sounding tune with echoes of the Scottish bagpipes, “Stoney Lonesome” takes its name from a community in Indiana. It belongs to the run of haunting twin-fiddle pieces Monroe composed in that period.
The tune became a bluegrass standard, carried by fiddlers such as Kenny Baker.