“Eight More Miles to Louisville” was written by Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones, who recorded it for King Records in 1946, the year he was discharged from the U.S. Army. The session is dated to about March 1946, with Jones on vocal and guitar and Merle Travis on electric guitar. The record was issued about May 1946 as King 532, coupled with “Tears That Make Believe.” Jones was born in Niagara, Kentucky, in 1913, played clawhammer banjo, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1978.
The lyric is a homecoming. The singer has traveled the country, “from Portland East to Portland West,” seeking his fortune, and now he is heading for the place he thinks best of, “that old hometown of mine.” Louisville is eight more miles down the road, and when he gets there he will never be blue again. The girl he is going to win comes from Louisville, “little and small,” the kind you cannot find ramblin’ through the land. He pictures a humble plot for two in the bluegrass hills, where the Ohio flows by Louisville.
Jones recorded it again for Decca in Nashville on 28 November 1956 and for Monument in 1965. Bluegrass and banjo players recorded it over the following decades. Don Reno, Red Smiley and the Tennessee Cutups recorded it for King at the King studios in Cincinnati on 26 October 1959, with Reno on lead guitar, Ronnie Reno on mandolin, Mack Magaha on fiddle and John Palmer on bass, and the record (King 5346, coupled with “Mountain Rosa Lee”) appeared in May 1960. Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman recorded it for the 1963 Elektra album New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass, and it was included again on the 1973 Dueling Banjos soundtrack album from Deliverance. The Osborne Brothers recorded it on Bobby & Sonny (Decca, 1972), Mac Wiseman issued it as a single on RCA Victor in 1973, Norman Blake and Tony Rice recorded it on Blake & Rice 2 (Rounder, 1990), and Sam Bush on King of My World (Sugar Hill, April 2004).
