“Are You Homesick in Carolina” was written by Eli Johnston and recorded by the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys on Back to the Mountains, the band’s debut album, released on Randm Records on February 5, 2016. The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys came together in the Smoky Mountains as the house band at the Ole Smoky Moonshine distilleries in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, playing several sets a day, and the album captured the hard-driving traditional sound they had worked up there. C.J. Lewandowski sings lead and plays mandolin, Josh Rinkel sings baritone and plays guitar, Jereme Brown sings tenor and plays banjo, and Jasper Lorentzen plays bass, with Billy Hurt added on fiddle. The record was engineered by Tom Feller at Buckaroo Studios in Indiana and mixed by Mike Butler at Lost Ark Studio.
The lyric is a question put to someone who has left the Carolina mountains behind, asking whether the pull of home ever reaches them where they have gone. It is the kind of homesick song the first-generation bands built careers on, written new, and it became one of the band’s signature numbers as they moved from the distillery stage to the festival circuit and, by 2019, to a Grammy nomination for Toil, Tears & Trouble.
