“Nashville Blues” is a Delmore Brothers song, credited to Alton and Rabon Delmore, although several later albums list Alton alone. The brothers, both born in Elkmont, Alabama, recorded it as “The Nashville Blues” for Bluebird on 17 February 1936 at the Hotel Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, singing and playing guitars with Arthur Smith on fiddle. Bluebird issued it on B-6312 backed with “It’s Takin’ Me Down,” and Montgomery Ward released the same pairing on M-4753.
The song is a short, plain-spoken blues. Its singer is down and out, broke and badly dressed, though the people around him treat him kindly and keep him supplied with drink. In the end he settles on going back home to Arkansas to stay with his mother and father.
Charlie and Ira Louvin recorded it on 13 May 1960 at Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville for A Tribute to the Delmore Brothers (Capitol T 1449), with Jimmy Capps on guitar, Junior Huskey on bass and Ken Nelson producing. Doc Watson opened his 1964 Vanguard album Doc Watson with it, John Herald playing second guitar behind him. Norman Blake made it the title track of his 1984 Rounder album Nashville Blues, recorded at Studio by the Pond in Nashville with Charlie Collins on guitar, Peter Ostroushko on mandolin and Nancy Blake on cello.
Robbie Fulks sang it on Bluegrass Vacation (Compass, 2023), with Tim O’Brien on mandolin and harmony vocal, and Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton, both on guitar, open their 2025 Reprise album Live at the Legion with it, recorded at American Legion Post 82. The song is a different piece from Earl Scruggs’s banjo instrumental “Nashville Blues,” which Flatt & Scruggs recorded at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 3 September 1965 for Town and Country, which J. D. Crowe & the New South recorded in 1975, and which Scruggs played again on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972).
