“Highway 40 Blues” was written by Larry Cordle, born in 1949 in Louisa, a farming town in eastern Kentucky. In the early 1980s he was working for an accounting firm by day and playing clubs at night, including a house-band job in Hazard. Driving home from a show one night, he had a new melody running through his head. When his headlights caught the sign where he turned off Route 40 toward his house, the title arrived and the words followed. Cordle later said that many listeners take the song to be about Interstate 40, which runs through Nashville, but that he wrote it about the little state highway in Kentucky.
Ricky Skaggs, Cordle’s childhood friend and neighbour in eastern Kentucky, promised to record it, and he cut it for Highways & Heartaches, released by Epic in September 1982. Skaggs produced the record and sang lead, playing acoustic guitar and mandolin. Béla Fleck played banjo, with Ray Flacke on electric guitar, Bruce Bouton on steel guitar, Mickey Merritt on piano, Jesse Chambers on bass and Rodney Price on drums. Epic released it in March 1983 as the album’s third single, backed with “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die.” On 9 July 1983 it reached number one on Billboard’s country chart, Skaggs’s fifth consecutive number one. It also topped the Canadian RPM country chart.
The narrator is a country boy who answered the highway’s call when he was young, believing its promises of fame and fortune. He has rambled from town to town, played music halls and bars, and owned fine clothes and cars. Now the money is gone and he is thumbing a ride, with holes in his shoes and years since he was last home.
The song changed Cordle’s career. In 1985, at Skaggs’s urging, he moved to Nashville as a staff writer for Skaggs’s new publishing company, Amanda-Lin Music. He went on to write “Murder on Music Row” with Larry Shell, which won IBMA Song of the Year in 2000, and he was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2015. Skaggs sang the song as a duet with Cordle on Cordle’s All Star Duets (Mighty Cord, 2014), playing mandolin. In 2020 the two joined Tyler Childers on a version recorded for Spotify Sessions at the Butcher Shoppe studio in Nashville.
