“Suzanne” is a bluegrass song written by Harley Allen, the Ohio-born guitarist, harmony singer, and songwriter who was the son of Red Allen. It was first released in 1985 by the Harley Allen–Mike Lilly Band, on a Folkways album that took the song’s name for its own.
Allen was in his late twenties when the record appeared, still working in bluegrass and in the considerable shadow of his father. The move that defined his career came later, in Nashville, where he became one of the most successful country songwriters of his generation — cuts for Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Dierks Bentley, and Blake Shelton — and where a turn as a Soggy Bottom Boy on “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” brought him two Grammys in 2002.
The song belongs to the earlier, plainer part of that story: a lost-love number from a working bluegrass band, cut for a folk label rather than a country one.
