Lester Flatt wrote “My Little Girl in Tennessee,” and he and Earl Scruggs recorded it with the Foggy Mountain Boys in Cincinnati on 11 December 1949. The session also produced Scruggs’s instrumental “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Flatt sang lead and played guitar, with Curly Seckler singing tenor and playing mandolin, Benny Sims on fiddle and Howard Watts on bass. Mercury issued the song on 15 October 1950 on Mercury 6287. The B-side, “I’ll Never Love Another,” was another Flatt song from the same day.
The singer is a rambler looking back. Long ago he left his home in the hills of Tennessee and the sweetest girl in the world, who begged him not to go and warned that he would be sorry for the way he had treated her. He has rambled all around and found nothing to take her place. Now he pictures wandering back to the little cabin, where she waits for him at the gate, and settling down with her in that little country town.
The Osborne Brothers recorded it on 8 February 1968 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, with Bobby Osborne singing lead and playing mandolin, for Yesterday, Today & the Osborne Brothers (Decca, 1968). In December 1968 J. D. Crowe & the Kentucky Mountain Boys cut it as “Little Girl in Tennessee” at Lemco Studios in Lexington, Kentucky, for Bluegrass Holiday, with Red Allen singing lead, Doyle Lawson tenor and on mandolin, and Bobby Slone on bass. Lou Reid, Terry Baucom & Carolina recorded it at Doobie Shea Studios in Ferrum, Virginia, for Carolina Moon (Rebel, 1994), with Bobby Hicks on fiddle. Chris Thile and Michael Daves included it on Sleep With One Eye Open (Nonesuch, 2011), recorded in January 2011 at Third Man Studios in Nashville.
