Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys early in 1948 and within a few months had formed the Foggy Mountain Boys. “Down the Road,” credited to the two of them, came from their second Mercury session, held in Cincinnati in the spring of 1949. Flatt sang it and played guitar, with Scruggs on banjo, Curly Seckler on mandolin, Art Wooten on fiddle and Howard Watts on bass. Mercury paired it with “Why Don’t You Tell Me So” on a single, and it later appeared on the 1958 LP Country Music.
The lyric is a courting song. Down the road “a mile or two” lives a girl named Pearly Blue, about so high with brown hair, the prettiest thing in town. Anyone who wants to know where the singer is going can find him down the road at her place “most any old time,” every day and Sunday too, out before the rooster crows. One verse brings in “old man Flatt,” who owned the farm “from the hog lot to the barn” and made his living carrying the mail. The last verse admits the singer walks the soles off his shoes without knowing why he loves her so.
Flatt and Scruggs kept it in their show; it is on the recording of their Carnegie Hall concert of 8 December 1962. After the partnership ended, Flatt recorded it again on 17 September 1975 for Lester Raymond Flatt (Flying Fish), with Curly Seckler once more on mandolin and Marty Stuart on guitar and mandolin. Country Gazette put it on Don’t Give Up Your Day Job (United Artists, 1973). Stuart recorded it again for his own Busy Bee Cafe (Sugar Hill, 1982), and Earl Scruggs played banjo on that track. The Bluegrass Album Band recorded it in January 1983 for The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 3: California Connection, with Tony Rice singing, and the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience included it on their 2006 album DGBX.
