“I’m Waiting to Hear You Call Me Darlin’” is a bluegrass heartbreak song written by Lester Flatt with Chuck Johnson. Flatt, Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it at the start of the 1950s, in the early years of the duo’s career.
The lyric is a quiet ache of hope against the odds — a singer still waiting, after a love has gone, for the moment the lost sweetheart might call him “darling” once more. That patient, wistful longing was a common register in early bluegrass, and the Foggy Mountain Boys gave it their bright, clean treatment.
The song was carried to later listeners by the Bluegrass Album Band, the all-star group whose series of records devoted to traditional bluegrass standards reintroduced many such songs.