“Georgia Pineywoods” is a song by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, the husband-and-wife team who were among the first in Nashville to make a full-time career of songwriting. Boudleaux was a Georgian, born in Shellman and raised in Moultrie; he and Felice married in Newport, Kentucky, in September 1945, and the pair were elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1991. Their songs include the Everly Brothers’ first hit, “Bye, Bye Love,” and “Rocky Top,” which the Osborne Brothers first popularized and which is now an official Tennessee state song.
The singer was born in the Georgia pineywoods, fifteen miles from a grocery store, in a house with no television and cracked linoleum on the floor. Cows grazed in the back fields, chickens cackled in the pen, and he went hunting for Indian arrowheads. Life was good, he admits, though he couldn’t see it then. Now he is paid by the hour and leads a typical suburban life, with credit cards, buying power and a pile of debt. The chorus wonders whether the pineywoods miss him too, and calls them the ancient home of “the Cree and the Cherokee and me.”
The Osborne Brothers recorded it on 5 March 1970 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Bobby Osborne sang lead and played mandolin, and Sonny Osborne (banjo) and Dale Sledd (guitar) sang the harmonies. Ray Edenton on guitar, Leon Rhodes on electric guitar, Hal Rugg on steel guitar, Ronnie Reno on bass, Willie Ackerman on drums and Pig Robbins on piano completed the band. In 1971 Decca put it on a single (32794) with “Searching for Yesterday,” cut at the same session, and on the LP The Osborne Brothers (DL 75271). The single reached No. 37 on the US country chart.
In 1977 the brothers went back to the song at Studio One in Nashville, with Buddy Emmons on steel guitar, for From Rocky Top to Muddy Bottom, a two-LP set of Bryant songs on CMH. Other bands had taken it up by then: Bottle Hill put it on A Rumor in Their Own Time (Biograph, 1972), and American Bluegrass Express and the Down County Boys both released versions in 1975. The Grascals recorded it for their album 20 (Mountain Home, 2024).
