Musicians
- Carter Stanley — Guitar
- Bill Napier — Mandolin
- Ralph Stanley — Banjo
- Jack Cooke — Bass
Carter Stanley wrote “Going to the Races” and gave it to the Country Gentlemen, who recorded it as their first record. The band had formed on 4 July 1957, and Bill Emerson recalled that the first record was a “pay for your own record” deal on their own Dixie label, John Duffey engineering. The single was cut in October 1957 at the radio station WARL in Arlington, Virginia, with Duffey singing lead and playing mandolin, Charlie Waller on guitar, Emerson on banjo, John Hall on fiddle and Tom Morgan on bass, and it was coupled with Duffey’s “Heavenward Bound.”
Stanley took the tune from an older song, “Let Her Go, God Bless Her,” which J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers had recorded in Atlanta on 6 August 1935 (Bluebird B-6104). The chorus of “Going to the Races”—“I’m goin’ to the races, to see my pony run, and if I win any greenbacks, we’re sure gonna have some fun”—also turns up as a verse in the Louvin Brothers’ recording of “Let Her Go, God Bless Her” from their 1956 Capitol album Tragic Songs of Life. The words themselves are about a couple who have been told they cannot marry. They say the singer is not worthy of her; he answers that they do not know what they are talking about, tells her to raise her window high when he comes by and to hang her head and cry when he leaves, and heads for the races to see his pony run.
The Stanley Brothers did not record it in a studio, but they played it live: a performance from Front Royal, Virginia, on 30 August 1957 was issued on the album Shadows of the Past. In 1958 Starday released their reworking of the lyric, “Gonna Paint the Town” (Starday 406), which opens with a new verse and drops the last verse of the original. The Country Gentlemen kept it in their repertoire: there is a live performance at the Folk Gallery Club in Syracuse, New York, on 1 November 1964 (later on a Folkways LP) and a studio recording made in Baltimore in March 1969 and reissued on Rebel’s The Early Rebel Recordings, 1962–1971. Old & In the Way recorded it in 1973 at the Boarding House in San Francisco, with Jerry Garcia on banjo, Peter Rowan on guitar, David Grisman on mandolin, Vassar Clements on fiddle and John Kahn on bass. In 2018 James King sang it on Epilogue: A Tribute to John Duffey (Smithsonian Folkways), with Lou Reid on tenor and Eddie Adcock on baritone.
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