Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote “Rocky Top” in 1967 at the Gatlinburg Inn in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a hotel where they often stayed and wrote. The usual account says they were working on a set of slow songs for a project for Archie Campbell and Chet Atkins, and dashed off the fast “Rocky Top” in about fifteen minutes as a break. The husband-and-wife team had become nationally known ten years earlier through their songs for the Everly Brothers, among them “Bye Bye Love” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Both were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1991.
The Osborne Brothers recorded it on 16 November 1967 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Sonny Osborne played banjo, Bobby Osborne mandolin, Dale Sledd guitar and Ronnie Blackwell bass, and the brothers and Sledd sang. Nashville session players filled out the sound: Ray Edenton and Grady Martin on guitars, Hal Rugg on steel guitar, Jerry Carrigan on drums and Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano. Decca released it on 25 December 1967 as single 32242, with “My Favorite Memory” on the other side, and included it on the 1968 LP Yesterday, Today & the Osborne Brothers. The single reached No. 33 on the country chart. Lynn Anderson’s version for the Chart label went higher in 1970, to No. 17.
Under the quick tempo, the song is a city dweller’s longing for a hill-country home with no smoggy smoke and no telephone bills. The singer remembers a girl from Rocky Top, half bear and half cat, wild as a mink and sweet as soda pop. Two strangers once climbed the mountain looking for a moonshine still and never came back down. The ground is too rocky to grow corn, so the people there get their corn from a jar. The last verse comes back to the city, where years of cramped living have left the singer feeling like a duck trapped in a pen.
Other acts recorded it within a few years. Dillard & Clark put it on Through the Morning, Through the Night (A&M, 1969), Conway Twitty opened his 1970 Decca LP Hello Darlin’ with it, and Buck Owens and the Buckaroos included it on Ruby & Other Bluegrass Specials (Capitol, 1971). The University of Tennessee’s Pride of the Southland Band first played it at a home football game against Alabama on 21 October 1972 and has played it at the school’s games ever since. It is often taken for the university’s fight song, though the official one is “Down the Field.” In 1982 the Tennessee legislature adopted “Rocky Top” as the state’s fifth official song, by 97 votes to none in the House and 30 to 1 in the Senate.
