“One Tear” appears on the Bluegrass Album Band’s The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 2, released by Rounder in 1982. The Bluegrass Album Band project — Tony Rice, J.D. Crowe, Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks, Todd Phillips, with Jerry Douglas appearing across the series — pulled together what was essentially a supergroup of contemporary traditional players to record bluegrass standards in clean, highly arranged readings.
The song was written by Judy Osborne, who contributed several pieces to the Osborne Brothers’ catalogue through the 1960s and 1970s. The song’s authorship is not consistently documented in the publicly available discographic sources for this particular track. The Bluegrass Album Band catalogue draws heavily from the older Flatt & Scruggs and Stanley Brothers songbooks, and this piece appears to belong to that older traditional lineage; the Rounder CD liner notes are the firmest reference for the writer attribution.
The lyric is a heartbreak-as-single-image piece: one tear, one moment, one final acknowledgement that the relationship has ended. The conceit’s restraint — refusing to expand into a longer catalogue of grievances — gives the song its emotional weight. Tony Rice’s lead vocal and the band’s tight traditional arrangement give the recording its burnished surface. It works as a moderate-tempo vocal piece in G with a clear chorus harmony slot.
