“Kentucky Borderline” was written by Rhonda Vincent and Terry Herd, a bluegrass broadcaster whom the International Bluegrass Music Association named Broadcaster of the Year four times between 1998 and 2004. The pair also wrote the title song and two other tracks on the album where it first appeared.
It is a train song. A coal-fired engine pulls out of Mobile in a driving rain and runs north through the night, reaching Montgomery in the morning and Birmingham by noon, pounding out a rhythm as it makes up lost time on the way to the Kentucky state line. The verses dwell on the white smoke, the lonesome whistle and the fire inside the engine, and the last one turns to the people who cast the steel, drove the spikes and laid the rail, calling the train, an L&N engine, a monument to them.
Vincent recorded it at Sound Control in Nashville as the opening track of One Step Ahead, released by Rounder on 29 April 2003. She sang lead with harmony from Darrin Vincent and Jamie Dailey, over Bryan Sutton on guitar, Ronnie Stewart on banjo, Aubrey Haynie on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Darrin Vincent on bass, with Aaron Minick on percussion and Jim Britton credited for the train whistle. In 2004 the IBMA named “Kentucky Borderline” its Song of the Year, crediting Vincent and Herd as writers.
Vincent kept it in her stage show with the Rage: it appears on the live albums Ragin’ Live (Rounder, 2005) and All the Rage (2016), and Rounder included the studio track on its 2010 compilation Bluegrass Number One Hits. Other bands have recorded it, among them the Lindsey Family, who opened their 2008 album Shine! with it, the Oregon band Roundhouse on Rollin’ Down the Line (2009), and the Stoney Creek Bluegrass Band on Live on Location (2011).
