“Close By” is credited to Bill Monroe and Robert Van Winkle. Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys recorded it on 26 June 1954, possibly at Bradley Studio in Nashville, with Monroe singing the lead and playing mandolin, Edd Mayfield on guitar, Jim Smoak on banjo, Charlie Cline, Red Taylor and Gordon Terry on fiddles and Ernie Newton on bass. Decca released it on 4 October 1954 on a single with the band’s re-recording of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” cut on 4 September 1954 (Decca 29289).
The song is a lament. The singer presses his sweetheart’s picture to his heart and tells her he will feel she is close by. Years have passed and she has not returned, and he has been told that she has died. He recalls their last parting, and the lyric ends in a lonely graveyard, where a place has been left beside her and the two will sleep until Jesus calls them, “so that we can be close by.”
The Stanley Brothers recorded it on 29 August 1954 at Bradley Studio in Nashville, two months after Monroe, with Carter Stanley singing lead and Ralph Stanley the tenor. Mercury did not issue it at the time; it first appeared on the Bear Family set The Stanley Brothers & the Clinch Mountain Boys, 1953–1958 & 1959 (1993). Red Allen recorded it in Baltimore in 1965 (issued on County 749 in 1975), with Scotty Stoneman on fiddle. Kathy Kallick put it on Call Me a Taxi (Sugar Hill, 1996). Alan Bibey recorded it for In the Blue Room (Sugar Hill, 2000), with Dan Tyminski singing lead, Bibey on mandolin and Sammy Shelor on banjo, and Patty Loveless sang it on Ricky Skaggs & Friends Sing the Songs of Bill Monroe (2002). The Del McCoury Band included it on Old Memories: The Songs of Bill Monroe (McCoury Music, 2011), with Del singing lead.
