“Hickory Wind” is a song written by Gram Parsons with Bob Buchanan, reportedly composed on a long train ride from Florida to California in early 1968. It first appeared that year on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” the country-leaning album Parsons made during his brief, transformative stint with the Byrds.
The lyric is a deeply homesick one. Its narrator, worn down by life in a far-off, glittering city, reaches back toward a Southern boyhood — the pines and oaks and the warm “hickory wind” of the Carolinas. That ache for an idealized rural home is a thread that runs through Parsons’s writing, and “Hickory Wind” is widely regarded as his signature song.
Although it came from the country-rock world, the song’s plain melody and yearning made it a natural for bluegrass. It has been recorded across folk, country, and bluegrass; the version heard here is by the Seldom Scene, the long-running Washington, D.C., band known for drawing such songs into the bluegrass repertoire.
