Allen Mills wrote “Love of the Mountains,” and his band Lost & Found made the first recording of it. Mills played bass in the group, which he founded in 1973 in Ferrum, Virginia, with Gene Parker on banjo, Dempsey Young on mandolin and Roger Handy on guitar. That original line-up cut the song for the band’s first album, First Time Around, issued in 1975 on the Outlet label (STLP 1002) with Rod Shively producing. Mills sang it alone.
The song is a son’s memory of his parents. Two trees on the mountainside, always looking up toward the sky, remind him of his papa and mama, who lived there eighty years before they died; now two graves lie on the hillside by the cabin where they rest. In between come the details of the place: moonlight in the valley, an old wagon leaning against a stack of hay, green wood burning in the fireplace, snow around the redbud trees, laurel by the creek. The last verse recalls his father talking about the young days when he and mama first settled there, and about the love of the mountains the two of them shared.
Larry Sparks recorded it on 16 March 1978 at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, singing lead with Tommy Boyd on harmony; that cut came out on John Deere Tractor (Rebel REB 1588) in 1980, and Sparks had already released another recording of it on Kinda Lonesome (Lesco, 1979). Lost & Found recorded it again for Endless Highway (Rebel REB 1607, 1982) at Threshold Recording in Roanoke, with Mills still singing lead and Bubba Chandler now on guitar. The Seldom Scene included it on Dream Scene (Sugar Hill, 1996), with Dudley Connell on guitar, John Duffey on mandolin, Ben Eldridge on banjo, Fred Travers on dobro and Ronnie Simpkins on bass. Ronnie Bowman, who had sung with Lost & Found from 1987 to 1989, recorded it in Nashville for his 2019 album Ronnie Bowman, with Del McCoury and Garnet Imes Bowman singing harmony.
