The Carter Family
My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains
Single: My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains (1938) Discogs
“My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” was written by the East Tennessee musician Clarence “Tom” Ashley (1895–1967), one of the most influential figures in the early-20th-century mountain music tradition. The first commercial recording was made in 1929 by the Carolina Tar Heels — the influential string band that featured Ashley alongside Doc Walsh and Garley Foster — and the song circulated through the broader country and old-time community in the years following.
The Carter Family recorded a version that brought the song into the broader country-music canon, and Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley themselves cut a version together during the 1960s folk-revival period when Ashley was rediscovered by younger researchers and brought back into recording. Watson, who grew up in Deep Gap, North Carolina, knew the song from his own community-tradition setting and treated it with the kind of unsentimental directness that he brought to all of his Appalachian-tradition material.
The song’s lyrical premise — the singer’s resigned statement that his home is now far across the Blue Ridge and he doesn’t expect to see his lost lover again — sits in the long tradition of Appalachian songs of departure and longing. “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” has been carried by countless old-time, bluegrass, and folk-revival acts over the past century and remains a regular at jam sessions where the mountain-departure idiom is at home.
