“Bound to Ride,” also sung as “I’m Bound to Ride” and “Honey Babe, I’m Bound to Ride,” was first recorded by the Arthur Smith Trio. They cut it on 3 August 1937 at the Hotel Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina. The trio was the Tennessee fiddler Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith with Alton and Rabon Delmore on guitars, and on this side Smith played banjo instead of fiddle. Bluebird issued it in January 1938 on the back of “Nellie’s Blue Eyes” (B-7325). Smith registered a copyright on the song on 20 December 1943. RCA Victor brought the 1937 side back into print in 1964 on the reissue LP Smoky Mountain Ballads.
The verses have little to do with one another. The singer comes down from Tennessee riding the line, thinking of his little darling and unable to keep from crying. Next he is riding a streetcar and eating salty crackers at ten cents a pound, then working on the railroad and saving all he can. The last verse is a railroad man’s last wish: bury me under the ties so I can watch old number four go rolling by. Between the verses comes the call “Honey babe, I’m bound to ride, don’t you want to go.”
The Stanley Brothers made the song their own long before they recorded it in a studio. They sang it on WCYB radio in Bristol in March 1956, and again at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on 14 May 1960. On stage Carter Stanley usually sang the lead while Ralph played clawhammer banjo. When they finally cut it for King in Cincinnati on 17 July 1964, Ralph sang lead and played three-finger banjo, with Art Stamper on fiddle and Earl Taylor on mandolin. King released it as a single (King 5933) in September 1964 and put it on The Remarkable Stanley Brothers Play and Sing Bluegrass Songs for You. Ralph Stanley went back to clawhammer when he re-recorded it in Tokyo in May 1971 and at R.D. Homer’s studio in Clinton, Maryland, on 22 March 1973. The 1973 version, with Roy Lee Centers on guitar and Curly Ray Cline on fiddle, came out on A Man and His Music (Rebel, 1974).
Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 21 October 1962, with Flatt singing lead and Buck Graves on dobro. It appeared on Hard Travelin’ in February 1963, and the label credited it to “A. Smith.” String Bean put it on a Starday LP in 1964 as “Honey Babe, I’m Bound to Ride.” Emerson & Waldron recorded it for New Shades of Grass (Rebel, 1968). Larry Sparks cut it at Lemco Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1975, with Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and fiddle. Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys made it the title track of a 1979 Rounder LP. Banjo player Jim Mills opened his 1998 Sugar Hill album Bound to Ride with it, and Ricky Skaggs sang. Greensky Bluegrass recorded it on Tuesday Letter (2007).
