“Church Street Blues” was written by Norman Blake, who recorded it on his 1976 Rounder album Whiskey Before Breakfast (Rounder 0063), a guitar record with Charlie Collins on second guitar; Blake sings it there.
The singer is stuck uptown in the rain, watching a friend he calls “good time Charlie” and wishing he were home on the farm. He sets himself up in a rocking chair to see if he can lose his “thin dime hard times,” and he takes a picker friend’s yesterday’s newspaper, folds page twenty-one and sticks it in his shoes. He gives a nickel to the poor as his good turn for the day and throws his billfold away. He wishes he had some Black Diamond guitar strings so he could string up his old Martin and join a band. In the last verse he decides to stay put, pick and sing a while, and try to make a little change and give people a smile.
Tony Rice put it first on his 1983 Sugar Hill album Church Street Blues, recorded at 1750 Arch Studios in Berkeley, California, with Rice singing and playing guitar alone on the track. Several of the other songs on the album are also solo pieces, and the instrumentals include his brother Wyatt Rice on rhythm guitar.
Beppe Gambetta recorded it for Blu di Genova (Gadfly, 2002) with Dan Crary and Gene Parsons, with Parsons singing. Bryan Sutton included it on Almost Live (Sugar Hill, 2009). In January 2022 the Punch Brothers released Hell on Church Street (Nonesuch), a track-by-track reimagining of Rice’s album, which opens with the song: Chris Thile sings lead, with Chris Eldridge and Gabe Witcher on harmony. They had recorded it in November 2020 at Blackbird Studio in Nashville. Dan Tyminski and Molly Tuttle sing it on his tribute album One More Time Before You Go (North Star, 2022), which also opens with it.
