“I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky” was written by Bill Monroe and recorded by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys on October 27, 1947, during the productive late-1940s Columbia Records sessions that produced much of the foundational bluegrass canon. The song was paired on the original 78 release with “Molly and Tenbrooks (The Race Horse Song),” another Monroe original, and although recorded in 1947 it was not commercially released until September 12, 1949.
The song is a homesick Kentucky vocal in the high-lonesome mode that Monroe was perfecting through the late-1940s output. Like “I’m On My Way Back to the Old Home” and several other Monroe songs of the period, the song’s narrative is rooted in Monroe’s actual Rosine, Kentucky, childhood home and his own decades-long absences from it on the road with the band. The 1947 sessions captured the same Columbia-era band — with Lester Flatt on guitar, Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle, and Howard Watts on bass — that produced “Little Cabin Home on the Hill” and “Wicked Path of Sin.”
“I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky” became a Monroe signature and has been recorded by virtually every major bluegrass act in the Monroe-tradition lineage. It remains a regular at jam sessions, particularly when the singer wants a piece anchored in classic Monroe homesick-Kentucky vocabulary. The Osborne Brothers have one of the most-cited cover versions of the song.
