Clarence “Tom” Ashley, the banjo player and singer from East Tennessee, counted “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” among the few songs he said he had “put together” himself. In the notes to Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s, Volume Two (Folkways, 1963), Ralph Rinzler reports that Ashley remembered making it while working in the West Virginia mining camps, and that he told the folklorist Ed Kahn where one verse came from: as an itinerant musician he was always leaving town on a Monday morning. Rinzler also points to an older relative. Louise Rand Bascom published a song called “My Own True Love” in the Journal of American Folklore in 1909, collected in western North Carolina, which begins “My home’s in the state of North Carolina” and ends each verse “I never expect to see you anymore.” Bascom gave no tune, so Rinzler could not tell whether Ashley set old lines to a new tune or reworked a song he already knew.
The first commercial recording was by the Carolina Tar Heels — Dock Walsh, Garley Foster and Ashley — in Camden, New Jersey, on 3 April 1929. Victor issued it on V-40100, credited to T. C. Ashley, with Foster’s “Who’s Gonna Kiss Your Lips, Dear Darling” on the other side. It is sung as a trio with Ashley in the lead, and Foster adds bird calls and whistles one stanza.
The song works by repetition. Each verse sings one line three times and resolves on the same farewell the 1909 text used: my home’s across the Blue Ridge Mountains, how can I keep from crying, oh how I hate to leave you.
The Carter Family recorded it for Decca and the Delmore Brothers for Bluebird. Bascom Lamar Lunsford sang it for the Library of Congress in 1936 as “My Home’s Across the Smoky Mountains,” and according to Rinzler that field recording is where the Seegers learned it before taking it to city audiences. In July 1961, in Taylorsville, North Carolina, Eugene Earle and Rinzler brought Ashley, Walsh and Foster together for the first time in almost thirty years. With Doc Watson on guitar in Ashley’s place, this was the first of about ten songs they recorded that evening, and it was issued on the 1963 Folkways album. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs played it on 2 May 1963 at Neely Auditorium, Vanderbilt University, for Recorded Live at Vanderbilt University (Columbia, 1964), under the title “Across the Blue Ridge Mountains.” The Bluegrass Album Band recorded it in 1989 at Bias Recorders in Falls Church, Virginia, with Tony Rice singing lead, for The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 5: Sweet Sunny South (Rounder, 1990). Norman Blake, playing guitar and banjo, recorded it for Day by Day (2021).
