“Old Home Place” is a bluegrass song written by Mitch Jayne and Dean Webb, two members of the Dillards, the Missouri band who recorded it for their 1963 debut album, “Back Porch Bluegrass.”
The lyric is a story of loss told in tight, vivid strokes. Its narrator left the old home place ten years before, drawn to town and to a girl he hoped to marry; he lost the girl, and with her any way back, and now the home place itself has fallen into ruin. That theme — the pull of the country, the cost of leaving it — struck a deep chord in the changing America of the 1960s.
“Old Home Place” became one of the most beloved songs in all of bluegrass, recorded by countless bands and lodged firmly in the jam-session repertoire. It is widely regarded as a modern classic of the form.
