“Slippin’ Away” appears on James King’s 1993 Rounder album These Old Pictures. King’s debut Rounder release pulled together a hard-traditional aesthetic with sharp song selection and the distinctive vocal phrasing — weighted, slightly fragile in the upper register — that defined his short but consequential recorded career.
The song was written by Bill Anderson, the Georgia-born country songwriter and performer nicknamed “Whisperin’ Bill,” whose dense catalogue of country and country-adjacent material was a frequent source for bluegrass acts seeking well-constructed vocal pieces. The song’s authorship is not consistently documented in the publicly available discographic sources for this particular track. The James King catalogue draws from the harder-traditional songbook (Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, Cordle/Wilson contributors) and original or cover-credit pieces; the Rounder CD liner notes are the firmest reference for the writer attribution.
The lyric tracks a relationship slowly slipping away — not the explosive collapse of the harder bluegrass heartbreak repertoire but the quieter, more domestic erosion of two people falling out of each other’s daily lives. King’s vocal phrasing carries the lyric’s gradual quality without overplaying it.
