“Steel Rails” was written by Louisa Branscomb when she was about 21 years old, in the early 1970s. Branscomb has described the song as emerging from a feeling of time carrying her forward, with the central image of railroad tracks running off into the distance “round the bend.” The song circulated through the bluegrass songwriter network for years before the recording that made it a standard.
Alison Krauss recorded it on her 1990 Rounder album I’ve Got That Old Feeling — the version associated with this entry — and the song became a turning point for both Krauss and Branscomb. Krauss’s reading won the SPBGMA Song of the Year, and the song held the longest-running chart-hit record in bluegrass at one point, helping inspire a generation of young women into bluegrass.
The lyric pairs the steel-rails image with a relationship looking toward an uncertain future: the narrator and her partner moving forward together, the tracks running away ahead of them, the destination not specified but the journey itself the point. John Denver later recorded the song on his final album, earning “Steel Rails” a second Grammy nomination. It works as a moderate-tempo vocal feature in G or A with a strong harmony slot.
