Album
Musicians
- Harley "Red" Allen — Guitar
- Frank Wakefield — Backup Vocals, Mandolin
- Robbie Robinson — Baritone Vocals, Banjo
- Jim Cox — Bass
“Don’t Lie to Me” is a song by Harley “Red” Allen. Allen was born in 1930 in Pigeon Roost Hollow, Kentucky. After a stint in the Marines he settled in Dayton, Ohio, in 1949. There, in 1952, he met the teenage mandolinist Frank Wakefield and took him into his first band, the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys. Allen spent time with the Osborne Brothers in the mid-1950s, and Wakefield toured with Jimmy Martin. Wakefield moved to the Washington–Baltimore area late in 1959, and Allen followed in 1960, where the two worked as Red Allen and the Kentuckians until Wakefield left in 1965.
The only recording of the song by the pair dates from April 1963. Producer Pete Kuykendall recorded it as a demo for Rebel Records at Wynwood, his home basement studio in Falls Church, Virginia. Allen sang lead and played rhythm guitar, with Wakefield on mandolin, Ralph “Robbie” Robinson on banjo and Jim Cox on bass. Wakefield and Robinson joined in on the vocal. The demo was not released at the time. It finally appeared in 2004 as the opening track of Rebel’s Keep On Going: The Rebel & Melodeon Recordings.
The singer is asking for the truth. His sweetheart’s old love is back in town, and she happened to see him on the street. Since then she has been cold toward him and acts strangely when they are together, her thoughts “miles away,” and at night he hears her crying. If she no longer loves him, he wants to be told: “Don’t lie to me if you don’t love me, don’t lead me on if you don’t care.”
Adam Steffey recorded it for his Sugar Hill album One More for the Road, released in September 2009. He described it as “a Red Allen song from the 1960s.” Steffey sang lead and played mandolin, with Ronnie Bowman singing harmony, Dan Tyminski on guitar, Ron Stewart on banjo, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Barry Bales on bass.
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