“Cabin on a Mountain” comes from the California duo Vern & Ray: the mandolin player and singer Vern Williams, an Arkansas native who had settled in Stockton, and the fiddler Ray Park, who teamed up in 1960. Their guitarist Clyde Williamson is credited with the song, alone on the first issue and with Cal Veale on later ones. Vern & Ray recorded it in Stockton on 19 March 1961, with Williamson on guitar, Luther Riley on banjo and Bill Carter on electric bass, and Williams and Park singing. Starday issued it on an EP named after the song, and in March 1962 put it on the label’s various-artists LP More Banjo in the Hills.
The singer is a wanderer who has rambled the world over and sailed the deep blue sea, and what he wants is a cabin on a mountain far away in Tennessee, the dearest place this side of heaven. He said goodbye there to his blue-eyed mountain sweetheart, dreams of her every night, and in the last verse is on his way back, sure that the only place for him is in that cabin with his darling.
Vern Williams kept the song after the duo split. In 1980 his Vern Williams Band recorded it at 1750 Arch Studios in Berkeley, with Williams singing lead on the verses and tenor on the choruses over his son Delbert and banjo player Keith Little, as the opening track of Bluegrass from the Gold Country (Rounder, 1981); that LP credits the song as traditional. Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals cut it in 1974 for their self-titled Revonah album, released in 1975, with McCoury singing it alone. Country Gazette recorded it for Bluegrass Tonight! (Flying Fish, 1986), Becky Buller for Little Bird (2004) and Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass for Road into Town (2012). King took the song’s title for a 2004 CD of King and Starday recordings from the 1950s and ’60s, and Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick included it on Sing the Songs of Vern & Ray in 2014, with Lewis singing.
