Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys
Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures
Over the Sunset Hill (1968) Bluegrass Discography
“Green Pastures” (sometimes “Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures”) is generally credited to Avril Gearheart and Ralph Stanley and was first recorded by Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys in 1968. The song belongs to Stanley’s deep gospel catalogue from the post-Carter-Stanley era, drawing on the Twenty-Third Psalm’s pastoral imagery (“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures”) and the broader Southern-gospel home-going tradition.
The recording most modern listeners know is Emmylou Harris’s reading on Roses in the Snow, released in 1980 — the album associated with this entry. Roses in the Snow was Harris’s bluegrass-leaning seventh studio album, produced by Brian Ahern, and pulled in material from Flatt & Scruggs, the Carter Family, Paul Simon, and others. Harris’s “Green Pastures” features harmony vocals from Ricky Skaggs and Dolly Parton; it is one of the album’s most-recognised tracks and one of the most-cited single recordings in the post-1980 bluegrass gospel catalogue.
The lyric works through a single repeated yearning — the singer longing to go up home to live in green pastures — and the harmonic shape leaves obvious slots for a high tenor and high baritone above the lead. It remains a regular call in bluegrass gospel sets where the trio or quartet harmony is the centre of the arrangement.
