“In Despair” is a bluegrass heartbreak song credited to Bill Monroe and Juanita Pennington. Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys recorded it in the late 1950s, and it appeared on his 1958 album “Knee Deep in Blue Grass.”
The lyric lives up to its title — a portrait of a singer sunk in the hopelessness of lost love, finding no comfort anywhere. Monroe set those bleak words in a high, aching trio harmony, and the resulting performance is among the more emotionally raw recordings of his catalog.
The song stayed in the bluegrass repertoire and was revived by the Dreadful Snakes, a short-lived Nashville group of leading younger musicians who recorded an album of mostly traditional material in the early 1980s. Their version, heard here, brought “In Despair” to a new generation of pickers.
