Album
Musicians
- Bob Shane — Vocals
- Nick Reynolds — Vocals
- John Stewart — Vocals
Brown Mountain is a long, low ridge above the Catawba Valley near Morganton, North Carolina, at the edge of Linville Gorge, and for more than a century people have watched for lights that seem to rise and drift along it at night. Reports began appearing in print around 1912. The U.S. Geological Survey looked into them twice, in 1913 and again in 1922, and put them down to distant train and automobile headlights and brush fires, but by then the lights belonged to folklore. One of the stories told about them, published by the mid-1930s, was of a planter who went hunting in the mountains and never came home, and of the faithful slave who went out with a lantern to look for him and is still searching.
Scott Wiseman was born in 1909 in Spruce Pine, some thirty miles to the north. With his wife Lulu Belle he had been one of the biggest acts on Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance, and he wrote “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and, with Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “Mountain Dew.” In “Brown Mountain Light” he set the legend to a story-song: travelers in covered wagons camped on the flats watch for the light, and the lyric tells who is carrying it — the old servant who searched in vain day and night, whose spirit lingers on and whose lantern still shines.
The song reached records in 1962 from two directions at once. The Kingston Trio, then the best-selling folk group in America, put it at the head of Something Special, cut for Capitol in April and released in July, with Jimmie Haskell’s orchestrations around Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds and John Stewart. Later that year Wiseman and Lulu Belle recorded it themselves for Starday’s The Sweethearts of Country Music in Arthur Smith’s Charlotte studio, Lulu Belle singing lead with Scotty on harmony. The Tennessee singer Hamper McBee recorded it with Guy Carawan the same year.
Bluegrass bands claimed it almost immediately. In 1963 the Hillmen — Vern Gosdin singing lead, his brother Rex on bass, Don Parmley on banjo and a young Chris Hillman on mandolin — cut it at World Pacific Studios in Hollywood, though the session stayed on the shelf until 1969. The Country Gentlemen recorded it in June 1964 in Falls Church, Virginia, with Charlie Waller singing lead, John Duffey tenor and Eddie Adcock baritone; that cut came out on Bringing Mary Home (Rebel, 1966), and a live version taped at the Folk Gallery Club in Syracuse that November surfaced on Folkways in 1973. It stayed in the Gentlemen’s repertoire for decades. Charlie Moore and the Dixie Partners recorded it for The Fiddler in 1975, with Moore opening on a spoken passage.
Tony Rice brought it back on Tony Rice Plays and Sings Bluegrass (Rounder, 1993), recorded at Bias Recorders in Springfield, Virginia. Rice sings lead and plays guitar, with his brother Larry Rice on mandolin and tenor, Bill Emerson — a founding member of the Country Gentlemen — on banjo and baritone, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Vassar Clements on fiddle and Mark Schatz on bass.
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