“Look Down That Lonesome Road” is a song with deep roots in African American folk tradition. The folklorist Dorothy Scarborough documented a version in the mid-1920s, set down from the singing of a Black road worker in Virginia, and the song clearly circulated in oral tradition before that.
In 1927 the songwriters Nathaniel Shilkret and Gene Austin published a popular version, crafted in the style of an African American spiritual and drawing on songs such as “Deep River.” Between the folk song and the published one, “Lonesome Road” went on to be recorded hundreds of times, in versions ranging from pop and jazz to folk and country, its weary, searching lyric of a hard road traveled proving endlessly adaptable.
The song’s plainness and its blues-tinged melancholy made it a natural for acoustic and bluegrass treatment. The version heard here is by Tim O’Brien, from his 2005 album “Fiddler’s Green.”
