“I’ll Go Stepping Too” was co-written by Tom James and Bill Denny and was first recorded by Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys on August 29, 1953 in Nashville, released as a Mercury 78 paired with “Foggy Mountain Chimes.” The session lineup is one of the strongest of the early F&S period: Flatt on guitar and lead vocal, Scruggs on banjo, Benny Martin on fiddle, Curly Seckler on mandolin and tenor harmony, and Bob Moore on bass.
The lyric is a defiant turnabout: the singer’s woman has gone out stepping with somebody else, and rather than sit at home and stew, the narrator declares that he is going stepping too. The brisk tempo, Scruggs’s three-finger banjo break, and Benny Martin’s fiddle solo all combine to set the song firmly in the up-tempo Foggy Mountain Boys mode the band had refined in their first half-decade.
The recording remains a strong reference point for early-1950s Flatt & Scruggs. The song has been covered widely — the Osborne Brothers, Ricky Skaggs, the Earls of Leicester, and many others — and works as a comfortable up-tempo singer’s piece in G or A, with the chorus harmony slot offering an obvious tenor entry. It is one of the cleaner examples of the brisk, defiant register that defined Flatt’s lead phrasing during the Foggy Mountain Boys’ Mercury-and-Columbia run.
Assisted by AI.
Spot something off? Help us fix it.
