“I’ll Fly Away” is an Albert E. Brumley original, written between 1929 and 1932 and published in 1932 by the Hartford Music Company in a songbook titled Wonderful Message. Brumley later told the story of writing the song while picking cotton on his father’s farm in Rock Island, Oklahoma, humming the 1924 vaudeville-era ballad “The Prisoner’s Song” — he paraphrased one of its lines, transforming a prisoner’s longing for freedom into a soul’s longing for the next world. It is widely cited as the most-recorded gospel song in American history.
Early commercial recordings spread it through the gospel quartet circuit. The Selah Jubilee Singers cut it for Decca on February 21, 1941; the Chuck Wagon Gang’s December 1948 Columbia recording is reported to have sold more than a million copies, anchoring the song in the country-gospel canon. Hank Williams Sr. covered it in 1949, and James & Martha Carson followed in 1951.
The song became a fixture of bluegrass repertoires through countless gospel-set recordings, and the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought it to a new generation: the soundtrack featured the Kossoy Sisters’ 1956 version alongside a contemporary reading by Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, and the album went on to sell more than eight million copies. It remains the gospel song most reliably called for at any jam session.
