“Forty Years of Trouble” is a Troy Spencer song, and its first recording was made by Bob Paisley & the Southern Grass in 1985 at Bias Recording Company in Springfield, Virginia, for their Mountain Laurel LP I Still Love You Yet (ML 007). Bob and Danny Paisley played guitars and sang, with Joe Allison on mandolin, Randal Boring on banjo, Leroy Mumma on fiddle and Mike Paisley on bass; David L. Kline produced. The band kept the song: it is on their 1994 Brandywine CD Back to the Blue Ridge, and a version recorded in Harpel, in the Netherlands, in May 1994 became the title track of a 2001 CD on the Dutch label Strictly Country. Spencer also wrote “Cardboard Mansion,” which the Paisleys recorded on Back to the Blue Ridge and the Lonesome River Band on Finding the Way (Sugar Hill, 1998).
The singer is a man coming home after forty years in prison for taking a life. He worked shackled to a ball and chain in snow and rain, laying railroad track he never rode. He had a wife, and a son he has never seen; now that he is free, nobody knows his name, and he has no one to blame but himself.
Other bands picked it up around 1990. The Hart Brothers recorded it in December 1989 at Redbeard Recording in Athens, Ohio, for Wind Is Cold Tonight (Old Homestead), and the Shady Grove Band opened Mulberry Moon (Flying Fish, 1990) with it. Fiddler Aubrey Haynie put it on his Sugar Hill album Doin’ My Time in 1997, with Don Rigsby singing lead, Gene Johnson tenor and Ricky Skaggs baritone, over Haynie’s fiddle and mandolin, Bryan Sutton’s guitar, Béla Fleck’s banjo, Jerry Douglas’s dobro and Dennis Crouch’s bass; that album’s credits name Bob Paisley as the writer, where the other releases name Spencer. Big Country Bluegrass recorded it for Waiting at the Homeplace (Hay Holler, 2004), and Danny Paisley & the Southern Grass returned to it on Bluegrass Troubadour (Pinecastle, 2021).
