Musicians
- Roy Lee Centers — Lead Vocals, Guitar
- Ricky Lee — Guitar
- Ralph Stanley — Tenor Vocals, Banjo
- "Curly" Ray Cline — Fiddle
- Jack Cooke — Bass
“Little Orphan Girl” — usually titled “The Orphan Girl” — is a sentimental ballad of the nineteenth-century tradition, a tearjerker in the Victorian mold. Its lyric tells of a ragged orphan child who begs at a rich man’s door for shelter from the cold, is turned away, and is found dead in the snow the next morning.
The song circulated widely in oral tradition before it was documented; it appears in an early collection of Southern folk songs published in the 1920s, and Riley Puckett, the blind Georgia singer and guitarist, made one of the first recordings of it in 1925. Its blunt moral — a rebuke of indifference to the poor — gave it staying power in country and old-time singing.
The song passed into the bluegrass and folk-revival repertoires.
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