“Hard Times” was written by Aaron Allan and recorded by the Osborne Brothers, who released it in 1966 on an album of their modern bluegrass sound.
The song is a working man’s complaint. It speaks plainly to the old struggle between labor and management — the long hours, the thin pay, the sense of being ground down — giving the bluegrass songbook one of its blue-collar laments.
The song’s blue-collar subject kept it in the bluegrass repertoire.
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