“Fall on My Knees” is an old-time breakdown and song from the Galax, Virginia, and Mount Airy, North Carolina, country. Tommy Jarrell, who grew up at Round Peak near Mount Airy, remembered the tune “going around” there about 1915, and Richard Nevins has pointed out that it had been known in neighboring Grayson County, Virginia, a generation earlier. At Round Peak it was known as Fred Cockerham’s tune; Jarrell said of Cockerham, “He knew a hundred verses,” and Cockerham’s wife Eva told the collector Ray Alden that he would sometimes sit in his big green armchair and play it for hours. Mike Yates wrote in 2002 that it is “quite a common tune in the Hillsville, Galax, Mt. Airy area,” and his source Calvin Cole of Hillsville, Virginia, recorded in 1979, called it “Lonesome Road.”
That name points to its relatives. The words are a string of verses shared with other songs about a faithless sweetheart. Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag (1927) prints a “Lonesome Road” that begins “Look down, look down that lonesome road” and carries the same wish to have died before being born and the same “lyin’ tongue.” In the lyric, a man falls on his knees and begs his sweetheart to stand by him, looks up and down the long lonesome road, and recalls that the longest train he ever saw was ninety-nine coaches long and carried the only girl he ever loved. He is sorry he ever loved her, because she told him more lies than there are stars in the sky and will never get to heaven.
The Camp Creek Boys, a Surry County band formed in the 1930s whose members included Kyle Creed, Fred Cockerham, Paul Sutphin, Verlen Clifton and Ernest East, helped popularize the song through their recordings; a Camp Creek Boys recording of it is on County CD-2719. Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham are on County 741, and the Red Clay Ramblers recorded it on It Ain’t Right (Flying Fish, 1986). Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin included it on Stay Awhile (Rounder, 1995), and Tara Nevins recorded it on Mule to Ride (Sugar Hill, April 1999).
