“Kentucky Girl” is a Charlie Moore song. Moore was born in Piedmont, South Carolina, in 1935, and worked on radio and television in the western Carolinas in the 1950s. From 1960 to 1967 he led the Dixie Partners with Bill Napier, a former member of the Stanley Brothers’ band, and they made nine albums for King. In 1970 he started a new version of the Dixie Partners, and in 1973 he began a run of albums for Old Homestead, a label in Brighton, Michigan.
He recorded “Kentucky Girl” in Brighton in 1974, singing lead and playing guitar, with Ben Greene on banjo, Curley Lambert on mandolin and Terry Baucom on fiddle. Old Homestead released it that year as the B-side of “I’ll Break Out Again Tonight” (45-5036). In 1975 it opened the LP The Traditional Sound of Charlie Moore & His Dixie Partners. Moore died on 24 December 1979, aged 44.
The song is a homesick message from far away. It opens with three questions: is she lonesome tonight, does she miss him, and does the moon still shine on the bluegrass as brightly as it did the night she first kissed him? The singer remembers a cabin with vines over the door, in a valley under high mountains, where he left his Kentucky girl. The last verse has him on his way home in the moonlight, sure she is waiting with open arms.
The song found a wider audience in the late 1980s. Larry Sparks recorded it on 30 October 1986 at Chandler Audio in Ashland, Kentucky, with Art Stamper on fiddle, and put it on Silver Reflections (Rebel, 1987). The Lonesome River Band opened Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (Rebel, 1988) with it; that band had Tim Austin on guitar and Adam Steffey on mandolin.
