“Church Street Blues” is an original song by the guitarist Norman Blake, who introduced it on his 1976 album Whiskey Before Breakfast. It is a wry, talking-blues-flavored piece, the singer footloose and a little down on his luck, set to the kind of crisp, headlong flatpicking Blake was known for.
The song became a flatpicker’s favorite, prized as much for its guitar part as for its words. It reached a wider audience when Tony Rice made it the title track of his 1983 album Church Street Blues, a mostly solo voice-and-guitar record.
Since then “Church Street Blues” has been taken up across the acoustic-music world, recorded by the Punch Brothers, Billy Strings, and others — a modern standard that began as one songwriter’s offhand-sounding tune.
