“Freeborn Man” was written in 1967 by Keith Allison and Mark Lindsay. Lindsay was the lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders. Allison, a Texan raised in San Antonio, was then a solo singer and session guitarist and a regular on the television show Where the Action Is. He joined the Raiders the following year. Allison made the first recording, on his only Columbia album, Keith Allison in Action (CL 2641, 1967), produced by Gary Usher.
Jimmy Martin recorded it on 25 July 1968 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Martin sang lead and played guitar, and Paul Williams sang tenor and played mandolin. Chris Warner played banjo, Vernon Derrick fiddle and Bill Yates bass, with Ray Edenton on a second guitar and Snuffy Miller on drums. Decca issued it as a single (32378), backed with “Losing You” from the same session. In June 1969 it became the title track of Martin’s LP Free Born Man.
The narrator is a rambler. He was born in the South “twenty-some odd years ago” and first ran away from home at four. He knows every highway, back road and railroad track. He has a girl in Cincinnati and a woman in San Antone, and a worn-out guitar he has pawned “about two hundred times” and always got back. The last verse tells the listener they may not like his looks, his song or his talk, “but you like the way I’m gone.” Allison’s original also had a verse about picking oranges in Florida, cotton in Alabama and walnuts in Oregon.
Tony Rice cut it as “Freeborn Man” on Guitar (King Bluegrass, 1974), recorded at Lemco in Lexington, Kentucky. J. D. Crowe played banjo, Larry Rice mandolin and Bobby Slone fiddle and bass. Rice sang it again with J. D. Crowe & the New South on Holiday in Japan (Towa, 1976), recorded live at Kubo Hall. Ricky Skaggs played mandolin and Jerry Douglas dobro on that version. It also turns up on Rice’s home recordings with David Grisman, issued as The Gasoline Brothers, and on records by Greensky Bluegrass (Five Interstates, 2008) and Rhonda Vincent & the Rage (All the Rage, 2016). Allison’s 2021 obituary in the Hollywood Reporter lists Glen Campbell and Jerry Reed among the artists who recorded it.
