Musicians
“Lonesome Old Homesick Blues” first appeared on record as “Lonesome Homesick Blues,” a song credited to Maybelle Carter. As the original Carter Family’s guitarist she shaped the trio’s sound with a picking style so widely copied that it became known as the “Carter lick,” and she wrote some of the group’s songs herself, among them “The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea” and “Walk a Little Closer.”
Sara, A.P. and Maybelle Carter recorded it on 14 October 1941 at RCA Victor’s studio on East 24th Street in New York. This was the last session the three made together. The song was the third cut that day, after “Why Do You Cry, Little Darling” and “You Tied a Love Knot in My Heart,” and it was issued in February 1943 as the flip side of “Why Do You Cry, Little Darling.”
The singer has been away a long time and is riding the railroad line home, lonesome down to the shoes and afraid of losing the one left behind. The verses wonder whether that love has gone cold and name the destination: Maces Spring, the community in Virginia’s Poor Valley where Maybelle and her husband, Ezra “Eck” Carter, settled after they married in 1926.
Bluegrass bands took the song up decades later. Carl Story and his Rambling Mountaineers recorded it as “Lonesome Homesick Blues” in 1979 at Maggard Sound Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, for the Mag album Songs from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Under the longer title it appears on Carolina Blue (Webco, 1993) by Lou Reid, Terry Baucom and Carolina, with Reid singing lead, and on Matt Wallace’s For a Season (Pinecastle, 2014). Old-time and roots performers, including the Foghorn Stringband and Charley Crockett, have recorded it under its original name.
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