“Catfish John” was written by Bob McDill and Allen Reynolds. McDill, a Texas-born Nashville songwriter, put it on his 1972 album Short Stories (J-M-I Records), and Johnny Russell recorded it the same year; Russell’s single, released on RCA in November 1972, reached No. 12 on the country chart. McDill has said that Catfish John was a real person, a friend of his father’s. The song is credited with moving him into the front ranks of country songwriters.
The lyric is a grown man’s memory of a boyhood friend: an old man who lived and died by the river, born into slavery and traded for a mare, who never spoke in anger though his load was hard. The boy’s mother told him to stay away from the river, and he went anyway, walking in the old man’s footsteps at delta dawn and remembering that he was proud to call him a friend.
Bluegrass bands took the song up within a year of Russell’s record. The Country Gentlemen — Charlie Waller, Bill Emerson, Doyle Lawson, Ricky Skaggs on fiddle and Bill Yates on bass — included it on their self-titled Vanguard album, released in April 1973, and Mac Wiseman put it on Concert Favorites (RCA Victor, 1973). Old & In the Way played it at the Boarding House in San Francisco on 1 October 1973, with Peter Rowan on guitar, Jerry Garcia on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin, Vassar Clements on fiddle and John Kahn on bass; Acoustic Disc released that performance in 1996 as That High Lonesome Sound. Alison Krauss sang it with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Three (2002).
