“Walls of Time” was co-written by Bill Monroe and Peter Rowan during Rowan’s time in Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the mid-1960s. The song was first commercially recorded by Randall Collins, Curtis Blackwell, and the Dixie Bluegrass Boys in 1970, before Monroe and Rowan themselves recorded it on March 21, 1972; their reading was released on the 1973 MCA Father & Son album that paired Monroe with his son James Monroe.
The lyric works through a meditation on time and human limitation: the narrator confronts the walls of time between him and his former lover, the years already accumulated and impossible to undo. The conceit pulls on older traditional images — the river, the wall, the stranger’s gate — while remaining unmistakably modern in its emotional self-awareness.
The recording associated with this entry is Peter Rowan’s own 1982 reading on the album of the same name, Walls of Time (Sugar Hill). Rowan’s solo and Old and in the Way work through the 1970s and 1980s carried the song forward as one of his signature pieces; subsequent covers by Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers and others have continued to circulate it. It works as a moderate-tempo vocal feature in G with a clear harmony slot on the chorus.
