“I Might Take You Back Again” was written by LeRoy “Mack” McNees, who recorded as LeRoy Mack and played dobro with the Country Boys, the Burbank, California, band of the White brothers. Mack joined them in 1957, alongside the banjo player Billy Ray Latham. In September 1962 the group recorded its first album for Briar International, and on the suggestion of Joe Maphis, who also wrote the liner notes, it came out in 1963 under a new name, the Kentucky Colonels, as The New Sound of Bluegrass America. The song is on side one, credited to Mack, with Clarence White on guitar, Latham on banjo, Mack on dobro and Roger Bush on bass.
The lyric is a standoff with a woman who has come back after being untrue. The singer tells her to leave and not to hesitate, says she broke his heart nearly every day, and sends her on her way. Yet the refrain admits that loving her was his great sin and that he might take her back again, and the middle verse confesses that he loved her then and always will.
The Colonels kept it in their sets. A 1966 studio recording with Clarence and Roland White, cut at Second Street Sound in Paramount, California, was issued on the Shiloh LP Kentucky Colonels 1966 in 1978, and a live version with Roland White singing and Scotty Stoneman on fiddle appeared on the Rounder album On Stage in 1984. Country Gazette, whose bassist Roger Bush had been on the 1962 session, recorded it for A Traitor in Our Midst on United Artists in 1972, with Kenny Wertz and Byron Berline singing. In 1979 Roland White and a young Jim Lauderdale cut it in Earl Scruggs’s basement studio in Madison, Tennessee, for a duet album that went unissued until Yep Roc released it in August 2018.
The Bluegrass Album Band recorded it at Fantasy Recording Studios in Berkeley for The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 4 (Rounder, 1985), with Tony Rice singing lead, Doyle Lawson, J. D. Crowe and Jerry Douglas on the harmony, and Bobby Hicks on fiddle; that release credits the song to L. Mack and B. Graves.
