Bill Monroe wrote “I’m on My Way Back to the Old Home” and recorded it with the Blue Grass Boys on 3 February 1950 at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, Nashville, in one of his first sessions for Decca. Jimmy Martin played guitar, Rudy Lyle banjo, Vassar Clements fiddle and Joel Price bass. Monroe sang the verses himself and took the tenor on the chorus, with Martin singing the chorus lead. Decca held the side for two years, issuing it in March 1952 as “I’m on My Way to the Old Home,” backed with “First Whippoorwill,” on Decca 28045.
The song looks back from adulthood on a Kentucky childhood: evenings spent listening to foxhounds with his father in the hills, then leaving home, then the death of both parents, which leaves the singer alone in the world. The chorus has him travelling the road up the hill to the house, where no light shows in the window any longer. Monroe’s own life followed that outline. He grew up on the family farm near Rosine, in Ohio County, Kentucky, the youngest of eight children; his mother died when he was ten and his father six years later. The historical marker at the Monroe Homeplace in Rosine, which says he was born in a log cabin on that spot and that the frame house was built there after the cabin burned, quotes the song’s opening lines. The Bill Monroe Foundation restored the house in 2001.
Sonny Osborne recorded it in Cincinnati in August 1953, with Bobby Osborne singing the verses and Sonny the chorus lead. Red Allen and the Kentuckians cut it in New York in December 1965 for their County album Bluegrass Country. Old & In the Way played it at the Boarding House in San Francisco on 1 October 1973, with Peter Rowan, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and Vassar Clements; that performance came out in 1996 on That High Lonesome Sound. In May 1975 Monroe sang it with Ralph Stanley at Stanley’s festival in McClure, Virginia, for the Rebel double album Live at McClure, Virginia.
The Bluegrass Album Band recorded it in Berkeley on 22 September 1980 for The Bluegrass Album (Rounder 0140, 1981), with Tony Rice singing lead, Doyle Lawson tenor, J.D. Crowe baritone and Bobby Hicks bass. Monroe returned to it on 7 May 1985 in Nashville for Bill Monroe and Stars of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, this time singing tenor to Jim McReynolds’s lead, with Jesse McReynolds on baritone. Peter Rowan opened his 1985 Sugar Hill album The First Whippoorwill with it, and Del McCoury sang it on the 1996 Sugar Hill collection True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe.
