“I’ll Never Shed Another Tear” was written by Lester Flatt and first recorded by Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1950 on Columbia, backed with “I’ll Be Going to Heaven Sometime.” Flatt’s lyric is a resigned-and-hardened piece in the classic country mould: the narrator has finally moved past the point of crying over a lost love and declares himself done with grief. The direct, unhurried cadence of Flatt’s phrasing — never overwrought, always grounded in the declarative — made it one of the more durable pieces in the early Foggy Mountain Boys songbook.
The recording most modern bluegrass listeners know is the Bluegrass Album Band’s reading on The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 2, released by Rounder in 1982. The supergroup configuration — Tony Rice on guitar and lead, J.D. Crowe on banjo, Doyle Lawson on mandolin, Bobby Hicks on fiddle, Todd Phillips on bass — pulled the song into the contemporary traditional repertoire and set the arrangement most subsequent covers reference.
The lyric is a heart-broken-but-resolved piece: the narrator finally hardened past the point of crying over a lost love, declaring he is done shedding tears. It works as a moderate-tempo singer’s piece in G or A and is a comfortable festival-jam call where the singer wants something with a strong tag line and a clear chorus harmony slot.
