Musicians
- G.B. Grayson — Lead Vocals, Fiddle
- Henry Whitter — Guitar
“I’ve Always Been a Rambler” is one form of an old ballad that folklorists file under the title “The Girl I Left Behind” (Laws P1). It was in print by about 1847, English broadsides of the 1840s carried it as “Margaret Walker,” and collectors have found it across much of the United States and in Canada, Scotland, Ireland and Australia. Its forms go by many names, among them “Peggy Walker,” “My Parents Raised Me Tenderly” and, in a cowboy rewrite, “The Rambling Cowboy.” The common thread is a young man who leaves a sweetheart behind; in the version sung as “I’ve Always Been a Rambler,” she is the one who proves untrue.
The first recording under this title came from G. B. Grayson, a singer and fiddler from Ashe County, North Carolina, and the guitarist Henry Whitter of Fries, Virginia. They tried it for Gennett, but that take was rejected; on 31 July 1928, at Victor’s studio on 44th Street in New York, they recorded it again. Victor held it back until 21 November 1930, when it appeared on V-40324 backed with “I Saw a Man at the Close of Day.” By then Grayson had died, in August 1930. County Records reissued it on an LP of mountain ballads in 1966, and the New Lost City Ramblers recorded it for Rural Delivery No. 1 (Verve/Folkways, 1965).
In the Grayson and Whitter text the singer admits he has always loved women, whiskey and cards, and that, though his parents treated their only son kindly, he could not settle at home. He courts the tall, fair daughter of a wealthy farmer, who promises to be true as long as he is, and he leaves North Carolina for Marion and Johnson City, where work and money are easy to find. On the public square a postman hands him a letter: she has married another man. He reads on until he is sure it is true, and resolves to take to whiskey and cards over the girl he left behind.
Jack Cooke and the Virginia Mountain Boys put it on a Gambler single in 1966, Ola Belle Reed recorded it in Devault, Pennsylvania, for her 1973 Rounder album, and the Dry Branch Fire Squad included it on Long Journey (Rounder, 1991). In November 1995, at Maggard Sound Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, Ralph Stanley recorded it for Short Life of Trouble: The Songs of Grayson & Whitter (Rebel, 1996), with Jack Cooke on bass.
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