“Hello Stranger” is a song credited to A.P. Carter and introduced by the Carter Family, the foundational Virginia trio whose recordings shaped the course of country music. They recorded it in 1937, and it appeared on record the following year.
Like much of A.P. Carter’s material, the song reworks older traditional fragments into something distinctive. Its lyric is a brief, bittersweet meeting on the road — a stranger greeted, a hand briefly held, a parting — carried by the warm, intertwined voices of Sara and Maybelle Carter and the familiar refrain inviting the stranger to “put your loving hand in mine.”
“Hello Stranger” became one of the Carter Family’s signature numbers and a country standard, widely recorded across folk, country, and bluegrass. The version heard here is by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, from their influential 1973 album “Hazel and Alice,” a record that helped open bluegrass and old-time singing to a new generation of women performers.
