“Cora Is Gone” is credited to Odell McLeod, the Alabama-born country-gospel singer and songwriter who performed as Mac Odell. Flatt and Scruggs recorded it with the Foggy Mountain Boys on 20 October 1950 at the WDAE radio studio in Tampa, Florida, with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Benny Sims, Curly Seckler and Jody Rainwater; the same session produced “Doin’ My Time,” “Pike County Breakdown” and “Pain in My Heart.” Mercury issued it in early 1951 as Mercury 6302, with the Masters Family’s “That Little Old Country Church House” on the other side, and the track was reissued on the 1963 Mercury LP The Original Sound of Flatt and Scruggs.
The words are a man’s lament for a lost love. The singer says pretty girls have hearts of stone, recalls the ring and fine clothes he bought Cora with his last dollar, and says he will drift off to live in a dark hollow in the deep woods.
The Bluegrass Album Band recorded it in spring 1985 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland, for The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 4 (Rounder 0210, released September 1985), a record produced by Tony Rice. In 2024 Turnberry Records issued a new recording featuring Bobby Osborne, C. J. Lewandowski and Billy Strings, with Rob McCoury on banjo and Aynsley Porchak on fiddle; Osborne had died in June 2023.
