I Am a Pilgrim

The earliest recording usually cited is “I’m a Pilgrim” by the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette, a Black vocal group. They recorded it in New York around July 1924, and Paramount issued it that autumn on 12225, backed with “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”

Merle Travis brought the song into country music. He recorded it on 13 August 1946, probably at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, singing to his own guitar with Cliffie Stone on bass and Lee Gillette producing. Capitol issued it in June 1947 in Folk Songs of the Hills, a set of four 78s that also held “Nine Pound Hammer,” “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” and paired it with “Nine Pound Hammer” on a single in 1948. A Kentucky story says that Lyman Rager, brother of Travis’s guitar mentor Mose Rager, learned it in jail from a Black prisoner and that it reached Travis through the Ragers. Tellings differ on which jail it was and on which brother taught him. Mose Rager, filmed by the folklorist D.K. Wilgus in the early 1960s, called it “just an old brush arbor song.”

Bill Monroe recorded it on 20 March 1958 at Bradley Film & Recording in Nashville for the Decca album I Saw the Light. Monroe sang lead, with Edd Mayfield on tenor, Kenny Baker on baritone and Culley Holt on bass. In January 1963 the Country Gentlemen sang it at the Sacred Mushroom in Columbus, Ohio, for the Folkways album On the Road. That December, Ralph Stanley sang lead on it at a Stanley Brothers session in Baltimore that Wango issued in 1966 under the name John’s Gospel Quartet. The Kentucky Colonels, with Clarence White on guitar, cut it as an instrumental for Appalachian Swing! (World Pacific, 1964). The Byrds included it on Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1968 and put it on the B-side of “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Doc Watson sang it on Doc Watson on Stage (Vanguard, 1970), and Travis recorded it again for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken in 1972.