“Sawmill Road” was written by Randall Hylton and Kermit Teague. It reached record in 1992 through Lost & Found, a band formed in Virginia in the early 1970s with Allen Mills among its original members. In the summer of 1992 their recording appeared on Prime Cuts of Bluegrass, Vol. 1, a various-artists disc issued on 15 July, and in November it was the third track on their Rebel album January Rain, played by Barry Berrier on guitar, Lynwood Lunsford on banjo, Dempsey Young on mandolin and Mills on bass. The refrain line, “Down on Sawmill Road,” is also the title of a 2010 Rebel compilation of the band’s recordings for the label, which includes the song.
The song is a whole life told by a man who never left the road where he was born. He grew up poor, in a house his father built from sawmill slabs, with whatever fish they caught sometimes the only meal and his mother scrubbing the family’s clothes by hand. As a young man he runs off with the girl next door, works two jobs and lives with her parents until they can buy a place of their own, where they raise four children. In the last verse he reckons that a lifetime of hard work has left him with modest means and no envy of the wealthy, and he expects to be buried on the same road.
Hylton recorded the song himself on 8 October 1995 at Speed’s Tree Recording in Benton Harbor, singing and playing guitar and mandolin, for his Copper Creek album True Stories, Tall Tales, and Lies, released in July 1996. A songwriter whose work was recorded by Ralph Stanley, Doyle Lawson, Rhonda Vincent, the Bluegrass Cardinals and the Country Gentlemen, among others, he died in Nashville on 14 March 2001 after an aneurysm, at the age of 56.
