Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys
Going Across the Sea
Hear the Whistles Blow: Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs Sing Songs of Rivers and Rails (1967) Bluegrass Discography
“Goin’ Across the Sea” (also “I’m Going Across the Sea”) is a traditional banjo-driven piece whose earliest commercial recording is generally taken to be Uncle Dave Macon’s 1925 side. Macon, the Grand Ole Opry’s first major star, learned a great many of his pieces from the older Black and white musicians he met as a hauling-and-mule-trade businessman in central Tennessee; this song belongs to the broader floating-verse and sea-and-distance song family that ran through pre-recording-era Southern repertoire.
Bill Monroe carried it into the bluegrass canon through his Blue Grass Boys, and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs kept it in their working sets after leaving Monroe; the piece is sometimes informally referred to as a Flatt & Scruggs staple. Hot Rize’s 1984 reading — the version associated with this entry — brought the song to the post-1970s bluegrass-revival audience with a hard, traditional reading.
The lyric is a leaving-this-country piece in the older mould: the narrator is going across the sea, leaving troubles and a sweetheart behind, with verses floating in from the broader pool of similar songs (“going to leave old Dixie,” “going where the chilly winds don’t blow”). It works as an up-tempo banjo-driven piece in G and is a steady call at festival jams that lean toward the older Monroe-Flatt-Scruggs songbook.
