“Out on the Ocean” is a bluegrass song written by Pete Kuykendall, the Washington-area banjo player and discographer better remembered as the co-founder and longtime editor of Bluegrass Unlimited. Red Allen recorded it in the mid-1960s with his band the Kentuckians, the group he led after settling in the same Washington, D.C., orbit — a scene small enough that songs moved easily between the people documenting the music and the people playing it.
The lyric is a study in longing and loneliness, the image of being lost and adrift “out on the ocean” standing in for the singer’s heartsick isolation. It is a conceit that suits Allen particularly well: his was one of the most powerful lead voices of his generation, and the hard, traditional bluegrass the Kentuckians played left nothing between that voice and the listener.
The song never became a jam standard, but it stayed alive among musicians drawn to the Red Allen repertoire — carried, as much of that repertoire has been, by singers who came to it through his recording rather than through the sheet.
