“My Cabin in Caroline” is a Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs song, published by Peer, from the first months of their partnership. The two had left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys early in 1948 and within a few months had formed the Foggy Mountain Boys. Around November of that year they held their first session for Mercury, produced by Murray Nash in the studio of radio station WROL on Gay Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, and cut four sides. “My Cabin in Caroline” was one of them.
The lyric is a homeward song with a wedding at the end of the road. In the hills of Caroline there is a cabin in the pines, and a blue-eyed girl is waiting there for the singer. He is packing his grip for the long trip back, promises never to stray, and plans that someday she will be his wife and they will live in the cabin together. The last verse imagines a late night with the moon shining and a whippoorwill calling from the hill, when he will tell her he loves her and always will.
On the record Flatt sang lead alone and played guitar, with Scruggs on banjo, Mac Wiseman on second guitar, Jim Shumate on fiddle and Howard Watts on bass. Wiseman sang tenor on “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart” from the same session, and Mercury paired the two on 6181 in April 1949. Mercury kept the side in print: it was on the LP Country Music (MG 20358) in February 1958, and in September 1967 Mercury reissued it on 72739 as the B-side of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” retitled for the occasion “Theme from Bonnie and Clyde.”
Flatt came back to the song after the partnership ended. He recorded it with the Nashville Grass on 17 September 1975 at the Sound Shop in Nashville for Lester Raymond Flatt (Flying Fish), with Curly Seckler, Kenny Ingram and Paul Warren on the harmony and Marty Stuart in the band. Bill Monroe cut it himself on 20 October 1976 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, singing lead, for Sings Bluegrass, Body and Soul (MCA, 1977). Larry Rice put it on Mr. Poverty (King Bluegrass, 1975), with Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs and J. D. Crowe singing behind him, and the Osborne Brothers recorded it in Nashville for Bluegrass Collection (CMH, 1978).
