“Rocky Road Blues” is Bill Monroe’s song, and his Blue Grass Boys made the first record of it on 13 February 1945, at the WBBM radio station in Chicago. The same session also produced “Kentucky Waltz,” “True Life Blues,” “Goodbye Old Pal,” “Footprints in the Snow” and “Blue Grass Special.” Monroe sang lead and played mandolin. Tex Willis played guitar, Chubby Wise fiddle, David “Stringbean” Akeman banjo, Wilene “Sally Ann” Forrester accordion, and Howard Watts, known as Cedric Rainwater, bass. The Bluegrass Discography also lists Curley Bradshaw on a second guitar, with a question mark. Columbia issued the side on 14 January 1946 as 36907, with “Kentucky Waltz” on the other side.
The song follows the old blues pattern of a line sung, repeated and then answered. The singer’s road is rocky, but he insists it won’t be rocky long. Another man has gone off with his woman, and he has worn out the soles of his shoes with the blues. He turns the old saying about not missing the water until the well runs dry into a line about not missing a woman until she says goodbye. In the last verse he asks the Lord to bring her home: he isn’t lonesome, he says, he just doesn’t want to be alone.
The song soon reached singers outside Monroe’s circle. Gene Vincent released it as a Capitol single (4010) in 1958, backed with “Yes I Love You Baby.” Bluegrass bands kept it in their repertoire from the 1960s onward. The Tennessee River Boys included it on Good Old Mountain Music (Cumberland, 1963). The Lonesome River Band recorded it for Looking for Yourself (Rebel, 1989), with Tim Austin, Dan Tyminski, Dale Perry and Jerry McMillan singing and Stuart Duncan on fiddle. Hot Rize, with Tim O’Brien singing lead, put it on Take It Home (Sugar Hill, 1990). Jim & Jesse recorded it in 1992 for their CMH album Tribute to Bill Monroe. Leftover Salmon played it at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado, on 28 October 1994, a show released as Ask the Fish. David Grisman, John Hartford and Mike Seeger included it on Retrograss (Acoustic Disc, 1999). On Ricky Skaggs’s Monroe tribute Big Mon (2000), Dwight Yoakam sang it, with Skaggs on guitar and mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Joey Miskulin on accordion and Mark Fain on bass.
