The Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys
I’m Ready to Go
“Hallelujah I’m Ready” (also “Hallelujah I’m Ready to Go”) is generally credited in discographic sources to Don Pierce, the longtime Starday Records executive and 4 Star Records co-founder, and was first recorded by the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys in 1960. The Stanley reading — with its tight quartet harmony and Carter Stanley’s lead — established the song’s place in the bluegrass gospel canon.
The recording most modern bluegrass listeners know is Ricky Skaggs’s reading on his 1982 album Family & Friends — the version associated with this entry. Skaggs’s arrangement keeps the gospel quartet shape but pulls the tempo up and tightens the harmony for the early-1980s neo-traditional audience. The Country Gentlemen revisited it on their 2005 album Calling My Children Home, and the song has stayed in active rotation in bluegrass gospel sets ever since.
The lyric is a salvation-and-departure text in the older mould: the singer is ready, hallelujah, ready to leave this world for the next one, with verses cycling through familiar gospel imagery of the river crossing and the heavenly home. The chord shape is straightforwardly traditional and three-chord in G or A, and the song works as an up-tempo quartet feature in any traditional bluegrass gospel set.