“I Can’t Go On This Way” was written by Noah Crase, a banjo player born in Barwick, Kentucky, in 1934, who made his home in the Dayton, Ohio, area and worked for the post office in Franklin. In the 1960s he played with the fiddler and disc jockey Paul “Moon” Mullins in the Valley Ramblers, a band with a weekly television show on WKEF-TV in Dayton. The Valley Ramblers recorded the song in 1967 and released it as a single on Jalyn Records, a Dayton label owned by Jack Lynch, who produced the record: Jalyn 45-318, with “Long Gone” on the other side. The label credit names Crase as writer, with Jacklyn as the BMI publisher. Crase also played banjo with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and, from 1973, with the Boys from Indiana; he died on 13 April 2010.
The singer’s sweetheart has gone away promising to come back some day, and he pleads with her to let him hear from her. He admits that she never loved him, though he had hoped she would in time, and he remembers the good times they had and the love she once said she had for him, which he still carries.
The song came back nearly fifty years later as the opening track of Back to the Mountains, the first album by the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys, released by Randm Records in February 2016. C.J. Lewandowski sang lead and played mandolin, with Jereme Brown (banjo) singing tenor and Josh Rinkel (guitar) baritone, Billy Hurt on fiddle and Jasper Lorentzen on bass.
