“Harvest Time (In Homer Lawson’s Field)” is a song by the country singer Wild Bill Emerson — not the bluegrass banjo player of the same name — written with Chris Moore and Carrol Dunham and first recorded by Emerson in 1974. Lost and Found cut it in 1982, and the Lonesome River Band brought it to a new audience on their 2000 album Talkin’ to Myself. The song is not a gospel piece despite the title’s harvest imagery; the “harvest” is corn liquor, not the heavenly kind.
The lyric is a corn-stealing narrative: the singer and his buddies sneaking onto Homer Lawson’s Alabama farm to take what they need, the farmer asleep up at the house, the moon high over the field. The Lonesome River Band’s reading — sung by Don Rigsby, in the key of B — is the version most contemporary pickers reference.
