Album
Musicians
- Alan O'Bryant — Lead Vocals, Banjo
- Pat Enright — Backup Vocals, Guitar
- Roland White — Mandolin
- Stuart Duncan — Fiddle
- Gene Libbea — Bass
“Blackbirds and Crows” is a murder ballad by Don Humphries, the Asheville, North Carolina, songwriter who later settled in California and fronted his own band, Done Gone, in the San Francisco area. Its narrator tells of Eva, a fast-living woman everybody knew, whom he begged to come with him to a little place in Idaho. They are happy for a year, but she misses her old life, and he cannot bear to let her go. To the folks who come calling he says she packed her bags and is down in Atlanta; the truth is that she lies beneath the wheat-field rows, and no one knows who put her there but the blackbirds and the crows.
The Nashville Bluegrass Band made the first recording, for Unleashed (Sugar Hill, 1995), cut at Sound Emporium in Nashville with Pat Enright on guitar, Alan O’Bryant on banjo, Roland White on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Gene Libbea on bass. The album won the band the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and Sugar Hill later put the song on its 2002 collection Cool Blue Outlaws: Songs of Rogues, Rascals & Rapscallions. Humphries had earlier written “The Boys Are Back in Town” with Duncan and Enright, the title song of the band’s 1990 album.
The Lonesome River Band revived the song as track five of Mayhayley’s House (Mountain Home, 2017), recorded at Crossroads Studios in Arden, North Carolina, with Brandon Rickman on guitar, Sammy Shelor on banjo, Jesse Smathers on mandolin, Mike Hartgrove on fiddle and Barry Reed on bass. Reviewing the album for Country Standard Time, Devin Adams picked it and “As Lonesome As I Am” as its two standouts.
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