Bill Monroe wrote “I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling” and recorded it for Columbia in Chicago in October 1947, at radio station WBBM. The band was Monroe on mandolin, Lester Flatt on guitar, Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle and Howard Watts, known as Cedric Rainwater, on bass. The Bluegrass Discography credits Monroe with the lead on the verses and the tenor on the choruses, with Flatt singing lead and Watts the bass part on the chorus. Columbia issued it on a 78, number 20459, on 12 July 1948, backed with “Little Cabin Home on the Hill.”
The singer is the girl’s parent. Their little girl falls ill one evening as she walks home from school, and the sickbed soon becomes her deathbed. She calls the singer to her bedside and asks that her mother come quickly so that she can kiss them both before she goes. She tells them she hears a sweet voice calling from heaven, that God has made room for her, and that they should not cry. She asks them to take care of her little brother, and closes her eyes for the last time, to be met again on a “bright and peaceful shore.” The writer Robert Cantwell, in his book Bluegrass Breakdown, read the song as a child who leaves the world rebuking parents whose tears imply that their faith has been shaken.
Elvis Presley sang a brief, rough version on 4 December 1956, during the Million Dollar Quartet session. The Osborne Brothers recorded it in 1978 at Hilltop Studios in Nashville for Bluegrass Collection (CMH 9011), with Bobby Osborne on mandolin and vocal, Sonny Osborne on banjo, Ray Edenton on guitar, Kenny Baker and Blaine Sprouse on fiddles, and Bob Moore on bass. Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys put it on their Rounder album Bound to Ride (1979).
