Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys
I Hope You Have Learned
Single: Wishing Waltz (1954) Bluegrass Discography
“I Hope You Have Learned” was recorded by the Tony Rice Unit on their 1979 Rounder album Manzanita, the album that effectively defined Rice’s solo career and his “newgrass-traditional” instrumental palette. The session lineup is one of the most-cited in modern bluegrass: Tony Rice on guitar and lead vocal, Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and harmony, Sam Bush on additional mandolin, Jerry Douglas on dobro, and Todd Phillips on bass. The album was recorded across January and February 1978.
The song was written by Bill Carrigan and Eugene Butler and first recorded by Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys, from whose catalogue the Tony Rice Unit drew it for their 1979 Rounder reading. The songwriter credit on this particular track is not consistently documented across publicly available sources; it sits among the album’s mix of Rice-and-collaborator originals and outside material the band had brought into the studio. The Manzanita CD liner notes are the firmest reference for the actual writer attribution.
The lyric is a wry break-up text: the narrator addressing a former lover with a parting wish that she has learned what she needed to from the relationship she is walking out of. Rice’s vocal phrasing — restrained, faintly amused — is the element most often quoted in cover versions, and the song belongs to the small handful of Manzanita tracks that pair the harmonically open Rice-Unit instrumental approach with a strong traditional-bluegrass vocal hook. It works as a moderate-tempo singer’s piece in G.
