Rose Maddox
My Rose of Old Kentucky
“My Rose of Old Kentucky” was written by Bill Monroe and recorded by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys on October 27, 1947, at WBBM Radio Station in Chicago — one of the productive late-1947 Columbia Records sessions that produced much of the foundational bluegrass canon. The recording was released in 1948 paired with “Sweetheart You Done Me Wrong” as the B-side on the same Columbia 78.
The October 1947 session featured the canonical first-generation Blue Grass Boys lineup: Bill Monroe on mandolin, Lester Flatt on guitar, Earl Scruggs on banjo, Robert “Chubby” Wise on fiddle, and Howard Staton Watts on bass. This is the same lineup that recorded “Little Cabin Home on the Hill,” “It’s Mighty Dark to Travel,” and “I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky” during the productive 1946–1947 Columbia run, and “My Rose of Old Kentucky” sits firmly in the family of Kentucky-rooted love songs that defined Monroe’s writing of the period.
The song’s premise — the singer’s lover as the rose of his Kentucky home — pairs the homesick-Kentucky framing with the love-song tradition that runs through Monroe’s catalog. The song has been carried forward by Doc Watson, Rose Maddox, the Del McCoury Band, Darin and Brooke Aldridge, and many others, and it remains a regular at jam sessions where pickers want a Monroe-tradition piece with strong vocal melody.
