“Lonesome Road Blues,” known to most folk singers as “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” is a traditional song with no known author. The writer and folk-song historian Elijah Wald counts it among the proto-blues heard in Black communities in the later nineteenth century, and he notes that by the turn of the twentieth century it seems to have been known all over the South. Its form is so simple that singers made up new verses freely, and hundreds of them circulated.
The first known recording was made late in 1923 by Henry Whitter, a singer, guitarist and harmonica player from Fries, Virginia, who worked in the town’s cotton mill. He cut it for OKeh as “Lonesome Road Blues,” and it was released in January 1924 on the other side of his “Wreck on the Southern Old 97.” In 1924 the North Carolina banjo player and fiddler Samantha Bumgarner recorded an older-sounding version she called “Worried Blues.” In the Round Peak country of North Carolina the song kept the “Lonesome Road Blues” name, and the fiddler Tommy Jarrell remembered it “coming ’round” there around 1918.
The oldest versions are sung from inside a jail. The singer is down in the jailhouse on his knees and fed on corn bread and beans, and each verse returns to the vow “I ain’t a-gonna be treated this a-way.” Other verses complain of two-dollar shoes that hurt the feet, or promise to go where the weather suits one’s clothes.
Woody Guthrie sang it close to Whitter’s words, and he also made it his own as “Blowin’ Down This Road (I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way).” Bluegrass musicians recorded it twice in 1960 at Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs cut it as a banjo instrumental on 11 August. On 1 December Bill Monroe sang it with Carl Butler on guitar, Curtis McPeake on banjo, Dale Potter on fiddle and Bessie Lee Mauldin on bass, for the Decca album Mr. Blue Grass, issued in May 1961. Skeeter Davis took “Goin’ Down the Road (Feelin’ Bad)” to No. 36 on Billboard’s country chart in 1966. Elizabeth Cotten, Doc Watson and Bob Dylan have also recorded it, and the Grateful Dead played it at nearly three hundred concerts.
