“I’ve Waited as Long as I Can” appears on Tony Rice’s 1988 Rounder album Native American. The album as a whole is one of Rice’s more harmonically exploratory mid-period records, but this particular track sits squarely in the traditional bluegrass register — a straight-ahead singer’s piece in the older Flatt & Scruggs lineage rather than the open, jazz-tinged material that defines much of the rest of the album.
The song was written and first recorded by Hylo Brown, the Kentucky-born singer and guitarist who was one of the key transitional figures between honky-tonk and bluegrass in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Songwriter credit is not consistently documented across publicly available discographic sources for this particular track; the Rounder CD liner notes are the firmest reference for the attribution.
The lyric is a worn-down breakup text — the narrator finally walking away after waiting too long for a relationship that was already over. The signature feature is structural rather than lyrical: Rice (and Brown before him) places a full G-run as an answer phrase in the middle of the chorus line, so the vocal pauses on “I’ve waited to hear…” and the guitar completes the thought before the singer picks the line back up. Using the G-run as part of the chorus — rather than as a turnaround between phrases — gives the song its hook and ties Rice’s reading directly back to the Flatt & Scruggs vocabulary the run originated in.
