“Matterhorn” is a Mel Tillis song. The Country Gentlemen’s records credit Tillis alone, but BMI’s listing and the publisher, Universal Cedarwood, also name Fred Burch as co-writer, and the song’s paperwork dates it to 1963. Martha Adcock went looking for a Tillis recording and found none. Eddie Adcock thought he might have heard it on country radio at WKCW in Warrenton, Virginia, or from Tillis on a package show, but he could not remember how it reached the band. The notes to a Rebel box set quote Charlie Waller saying he learned it from a man he was giving guitar lessons to.
The narrator tells of four men who set out from Bern one sunny August morning to climb the Matterhorn: Albert the Australian, John the Irishman, and Bill and the narrator from Britain. Two miles up they lose John, and the rations fall below. An avalanche buries Al and Bill, and the narrator is left alone, two yards short of the top. He is dying on the mountain with no grave to lie in and nothing to keep him warm. The Queen would surely knight him if he could get back down, but it is closer there to heaven than it is back to the ground. The chorus is a warning: men have tried, and men have died, to climb the Matterhorn.
The Country Gentlemen recorded it on 15 June 1966 at Recordings, Inc., in Baltimore. Charlie Waller sang lead and played guitar, John Duffey sang tenor on mandolin, and Eddie Adcock sang baritone on banjo, with Ed Ferris on bass. Rebel released it as a single in May 1967 (F-267, backed with “Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and it went onto the LP The Traveler and Other Favorites. Adcock opened it with a banjo break played out of the G position with the capo at the seventh fret. He called the song “an instant hit with audiences,” and said Tillis told him the kick-off was very different from the way he did it himself. A later line-up of Waller, Bill Emerson, Doyle Lawson and Bill Yates recorded it again in Japan in January 1971 for Live in Japan. Eddie and Martha Adcock recorded it on Many a Mile (Patuxent, 2011). Later versions include Ronnie Bowman’s in 2019 and the Dead South’s on Easy Listening for Jerks, Part 1 in 2021.
