“Carolina in the Pines” was written by Michael Martin Murphey and released in August 1975 as the second single from his album Blue Sky — Night Thunder. It peaked at No. 21 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 on the Adult Contemporary chart later that year, riding the wave that “Wildfire” had begun a few months earlier.
The title misleads a great many listeners. Murphey has explained in interviews that the song is a love song for his wife Caroline Hogue and dates to the period when the couple moved from Texas to the Colorado high country, where most of Blue Sky — Night Thunder was written. The Carolina pines are an emotional landscape, not a regional one; fans from both Carolinas have nonetheless claimed it as a state song for half a century.
The bluegrass life of the piece begins with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver’s 1985 reading on Once and for Always, which slowed the country-pop arrangement, opened it up for tight tenor harmony, and added the chop-mandolin pulse that turned it into a regular festival number. Most of the bluegrass covers from the late 1980s forward trace their phrasing back to the Lawson arrangement rather than to Murphey’s original.
