“Long Journey Home” (also known as “Two Dollar Bill” and “Lost All My Money”) is a traditional American song with origins generally placed around 1890. It circulated under earlier titles including “High Sheriff” and “Deadheads and Suckers” before settling into the form most pickers know today, and is sometimes traced to the older spiritual “Do, Lord, Remember Me” as a structural ancestor.
The song was recorded as “Big Ball in Texas” by the Prairie Ramblers in July 1935, and it was the first song that Bill and Charlie Monroe — the Monroe Brothers — recorded in 1936. The Monroe Brothers’ reading is widely treated as the gateway recording that brought the song into the country and early-bluegrass canon.
Authorship is contested. Most sources list it as traditional, though one persistent attribution credits Albert E. Brumley — the prolific gospel songwriter responsible for “I’ll Fly Away” — with at least the canonical lyric set. Treat the authorship as traditional with a possible Brumley arrangement layered on top. The song has remained a jam-session standard ever since, particularly in its driving bluegrass arrangement, and its alternate titles continue to surface depending on which version a singer learned first.
