“Highway 40 Blues” is a song written by Larry Cordle, a Kentucky songwriter who would become one of the most respected writers in bluegrass and country. He wrote it about a small state highway near his Kentucky home — not, as many listeners assume, the interstate — with the title arriving as he passed the road sign on a late-night drive home from a gig.
The song became a major hit for Ricky Skaggs, Cordle’s longtime friend and fellow Kentuckian, who recorded it for his album “Highways and Heartaches” and released it as a single in 1983. It went to number one on the country chart, one of a remarkable run of chart-topping records from Skaggs in that period.
Its lyric is a road-weary musician’s lament — miles of highway, homesickness, and the wear of constant travel — set to a bright, banjo-driven arrangement that kept Skaggs’s bluegrass roots fully audible even at the height of his country success. The song has remained a bluegrass favorite ever since.
