“Lonesome Old Homesick Blues” is a song credited to Maybelle Carter, the guitarist of the Carter Family and one of the most influential instrumentalists in country music. The Carter Family recorded it in the early 1940s, toward the end of the group’s recording career.
By the account in the family’s history, Maybelle wrote the song while missing her husband, Eck Carter, and built it around a bluesy guitar figure she had learned from Lesley Riddle, the Black musician who taught the Carters a great deal of their material. The result is a true homesick blues — a plain, aching expression of longing for an absent loved one.
The song passed from the Carter Family into bluegrass.