“Old Home Place” was written by two members of the Dillards, the mandolin player Dean Webb and the bass player Mitch Jayne. The band — Webb, Jayne and the brothers Rodney and Doug Dillard — got its start in Salem, Missouri. In 1962 they moved to Los Angeles, where Elektra Records soon signed them. They recorded the song around January 1963 at World Pacific Studios in Los Angeles, with Jim Dickson producing, for their first album, Back Porch Bluegrass. Elektra released the album in May 1963 (EKL 232). Rodney Dillard played guitar, Doug Dillard banjo, Webb mandolin and Jayne bass.
Jayne, born in Hammond, Indiana, had taught in one-room schools in Dent County, Missouri, and hosted a radio show on KSMO in Salem. He wrote or supplied the lyrics for several other Dillards songs, among them “Dooley,” “There Is a Time” and “The Whole World Round.”
The song is a first-person story. Ten years after leaving the hollow where he was born, the narrator remembers falling for a girl in town and running away to Charlottesville to work on a sawmill crew. The girl ran off with somebody else, “the tariffs took my pay,” and the house he grew up in was torn down. The chorus asks what has become of the old home place, and why he left the plow in the field to look for a job in town. In the last verse, with the geese flying south and the wind turning cold, he stands where the house once stood. He has lost his love and his home, and he wishes he were dead.
The Hayes Brothers and the Bluegrass Ramblers released a single of it on W&G in 1966. J.D. Crowe and the New South recorded it in January 1975 at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland. Tony Rice sang lead and Ricky Skaggs tenor, with Jerry Douglas on dobro and Bobby Slone on bass, and the song opens their 1975 Rounder album J.D. Crowe & the New South. A different song called “Old Home Place,” credited to Don Reno and Bill Haney, was recorded by Reno and Red Smiley for King in Cincinnati in November 1954.
