Musicians
- Earl Bolick — Lead Vocals, Guitar
- Bill Bolick — Tenor Vocals, Mandolin
“Get Along Home, Cindy” — often called simply “Cindy” — is a traditional American folk song with no known author, catalogued as Roud 836. One of its earliest printed versions is in Anne Virginia Culbertson’s 1904 collection of African American folktales, At the Big House, in which a character sings a plantation song called “Cindy Ann”; its first verse has the singer heading to Richmond to help end the war, and the refrain bids goodbye to Cindy.
The melody is taken from the spiritual “The Gospel Train,” also known as “Get on Board, Little Children.” As with many folk songs, each singer added verses, and performers swapped verses with other songs, among them “Old Joe Clark” and “Boil Them Cabbage Down,” as Byron Arnold and Robert Halli noted in An Alabama Songbook. The version most often sung today is a courting song: the singer boasts of Cindy, who lives way down south and is so sweet that honeybees swarm around her, tells of the times he saw her — barefoot in a doorway, standing on a hill — and promises in the refrain to marry her someday.
In the early and middle twentieth century “Cindy” was printed in the songbooks used in many elementary-school music programs as an example of folk music. It turns up on screen in the 1959 film Rio Bravo, sung by Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan, and Andy Griffith sings it in a 1962 episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Among the earlier bluegrass-world releases in the Bluegrass Discography is Johnny Duncan and his Blue Grass Boys’ single on Columbia (UK), 1957. It is a different song from “Cindy, Cindy,” the Buddy Kaye, Ben Weisman, Dolores Fuller and Fred Wise composition recorded by Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.
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