“I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home” was released by Mac Wiseman on the Dot label (Dot 1115) in 1952, paired with “You’re the Girl of My Dreams.” The recording belongs to Wiseman’s early Dot run, the period in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he was establishing the high-clear-tenor solo voice and the ballad-singer identity that would carry through his long career.
The song was composed by Herbert S. Lambert and Harry J. Lincoln, a Tin Pan Alley songwriting partnership whose sentimental homesick pieces from the early 20th century were widely adopted into country and old-time revival repertoires. The song’s authorship history is not consistently documented in the publicly available discographic sources; it appears variously as traditional and as a co-credited piece, and the Wiseman recording is the earliest widely circulated commercial release. The lyric belongs firmly to the homesick-narrator tradition that runs through American country music from the early 20th century forward: the singer left home, the parents are old, he wonders how they are, will they still be there when he can finally come back.
Wiseman’s reading is the version most contemporary bluegrass pickers reference; he revisited the song late in his career on Keep on the Sunny Side with the Osborne Brothers, and Larry Sparks, the Valley Ramblers, and the Renfro Valley Boys are among the artists who have covered it since.
