“She Left Me Standing on the Mountain” is an Alton Delmore song. Alton and his younger brother Rabon, sons of tenant farmers from Elkmont, Alabama, made their first records for Columbia in 1931 as the Delmore Brothers. They were regulars on the Grand Ole Opry from 1933 until they left the show in 1938, and they were elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.
The brothers recorded the song for King in January 1946 at Radio Recorders in Hollywood. They sang and played guitars, with Merle Travis and Louis Innis on guitars and Roy Starkey on bass. King issued it on 28 May 1946 as the B-side of “I’m Lonesome Without You” (King 533).
The song is lighter than its title. The singer asks a girl to marry him, turns his back for a moment, and finds she has disappeared somewhere among the flowers and honeybees of the mountainside. A whippoorwill and a bear have a laugh at his expense. In the last verse he says he would give almost anything for her to reappear and tell him she cared a little for him.
Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys recorded it at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 22 June 1962. Jesse McReynolds played mandolin and Jim McReynolds guitar, with Allen Shelton on banjo, Jimmy Buchanan on fiddle, Don McHan on second guitar, David Sutherland on bass and Douglas Kirkham on drums. Epic released it on the LP Bluegrass Special in February 1963. That July the brothers sang it at the Newport Folk Festival, Jesse on lead and Jim on tenor, and Vanguard issued the performance on Country Music and Bluegrass at Newport in 1964.
Del McCoury recorded it as “Standing on the Mountain” on 12 April 1976 at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Bill Runkle singing lead and McCoury tenor. It came out on McCoury’s Rebel LP Our Kind of Grass in 1978. Fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves included it on Started Out to Ramble (Patuxent, 2009). Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers cut it for They’re Playing My Song (Rebel, 2012), with Adam McIntosh singing lead and Mullins tenor. Watkins Family Hour recorded it with Willie Watson for Vol. II (2022).
