“One Way Track” was written by Ricky Skaggs and recorded by Boone Creek, the band Skaggs led in the late 1970s, as the title song of a 1978 album. Boone Creek was Skaggs’s own group after his apprenticeships with Ralph Stanley, the Country Gentlemen, and J.D. Crowe.
The song works the image of a railroad track that runs only one way. The journey it describes allows no turning back, the lyric measuring a course — in love, or in life — that the singer is set upon for good or ill.
Skaggs later revisited the song with his band Kentucky Thunder.