“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. It belongs to a small subgenre of bluegrass moonshine-and-mischief songs, lighter in tone than the harder lonesome material the Lonesome River Band was known for, and their recording leans into that with a brisk tempo and a buoyant ensemble break.
The Lonesome River Band’s reading — sung by Don Rigsby, in the key of B — is the version most contemporary pickers reference, and it works as a regular jam call where a band wants a lighter narrative piece between heartache numbers.
