“My Lord’s Gonna Set Me Free” is a bluegrass gospel song, generally credited to the songwriter Ruby Rakes, that was recorded by the Stanley Brothers — the Virginia duo of Carter and Ralph Stanley, whose stark mountain harmony was central to early bluegrass. They recorded it for an album of sacred songs in the late 1950s.
The lyric is a song of deliverance and hope — the believer’s confidence that, whatever the burdens of this life, the Lord will set him free and carry him home. That theme of release from earthly trouble runs deep through the bluegrass gospel tradition.
Sung in the close, keening style the Stanley Brothers favored for their sacred material, the song became part of their large body of gospel recordings and a representative example of the form they helped carry into bluegrass.
