“Randall Collins” is a Norman Blake song, first recorded for his debut album, Home in Sulphur Springs. Blake, born in Chattanooga in 1938 and raised in Sulphur Springs, had spent years as a Nashville session and touring musician, ten of them with Johnny Cash, and had played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and in John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain band before he made a record of his own. He cut the album in one day, 30 December 1971, at Glaser Sound Studios in Nashville, with Tut Taylor on Dobro; the two of them produced it, and Rounder issued it in 1972 as Rounder 0012. “Randall Collins,” under two minutes long, is the second track, and Blake sings it over his own guitar and mandolin. His “Ginseng Sullivan” is on the same record.
The song is sung by Randall Collins himself, a gambler from Arkansas who names his stake and his draw in the opening lines. He shoots dice in the railroad yard, though it pays him little. Section-gang work, he says, will break a man’s back, so he hides in the shade of the water tank while the straw boss hunts for him. In the last verse a long train is being made up in the Memphis yard, and he means to ride it down to a town in Arkansas.
Blake kept the song in his own shows. A performance at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on 22 June 1979, with Nancy Blake on cello and James Bryan on fiddle, came out on Flying Fish’s festival album Tellulive in 1981. Other bands took it up early: Boys in the Band recorded it on a 1977 LP, Sunny South in Portland, Oregon, in 1986, and Dusty Miller, a group with Tim Stafford, Adam Steffey and Barry Bales, in Bristol, Virginia, for a 1989 June Appal album. The Kenny and Amanda Smith Band recorded it for Live and Learn (Rebel, 2008), with Kenny Smith singing lead, and Bob Minner included it, with Trey Hensley, on From Sulphur Springs to Rising Fawn: The Songs of Norman Blake (2022). Billy Strings sang it in a guitar duo with Bryan Sutton on Live at the Legion (Reprise, 2025).
