“I’ve Never Been So Lonesome” comes from Ted Lundy and the Southern Mountain Boys. It first appeared in 1962 as the opening track of a four-song EP on the New River label, titled “Never Been So Lonesome” and billed to Ted Lundy & Fred Hanna & the Southern Mountain Boys. “Please Don’t Honey Please,” “Dark Hollow” and “Ellen Smith” filled out the record. Later releases credit the song to Sam Humphrey, paired either with Ted Lundy or with Fred Hannah.
Lundy started on banjo playing clawhammer, the way his father played, and later switched to Scruggs style. He worked with Jimmy Williams and the Shady Valley Boys, and with Alex Campbell and Ola Belle and the New River Boys, and he filled in for Bill Monroe during 1959. He then founded the Southern Mountain Boys with Fred Hannah on mandolin, Bob Paisley on guitar and Jerry Lundy on fiddle. Jerry was Ted’s second cousin and a son of the old-time fiddler Emmett Lundy.
The song is a catalogue of loss. The singer’s wife is gone, his home is gone, and everything he ever loved has gone with them, and each couplet comes back to the title line. He cries to himself, walks the floor and the streets of town, hears a lonesome whistle and watches long nights pass. He still loves the woman who did him wrong. At the end he resolves to live alone, holding on to the hope that she might come home someday.
The Southern Mountain Boys recorded it again as the opening track of Ted Lundy, Bob Paisley & the Southern Mountain Boys, a 1972 LP on the German GHP label. Lundy died on 23 June 1980, and Paisley carried on as Bob Paisley and the Southern Grass. That band recorded the song on 9 October 1981 at Bias Recording in Springfield, Virginia, for An Old Love Affair (Brandywine, 1982), and Danny Paisley & the Southern Grass returned to it on That’s Why I’m Lonesome in 2018. Longview opened their self-titled 1997 Rounder album with it, recorded at Long View Farm in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, with Dudley Connell, James King, Don Rigsby and Joe Mullins singing. Rounder later included that track on its 2004 compilation Bluegrass Number 1s. Boone & Foster released the song as a single in 2022, and the Kathy Kallick Band recorded it for The Lonesome Chronicles in 2023.
