Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys
The Old Home Town
Single: The Old Home Town (1952) Bluegrass Discography
“The Old Home Town” appears on the Bluegrass Album Band’s mid-1980s Rounder catalogue, the version associated with this entry. The Bluegrass Album Band project — Tony Rice, J.D. Crowe, Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks, Todd Phillips, with Jerry Douglas across the series — consistently mixed older traditional material with under-recorded pieces and occasional outside contributions.
The song’s authorship is not consistently documented in the publicly available discographic sources for this particular track. The Bluegrass Album Band catalogue draws heavily from older Flatt & Scruggs, Stanley Brothers, and broader homesick-balladeer material; this piece appears to belong to that older lineage. The Rounder CD liner notes are the firmest reference for the writer attribution.
The lyric is a homesick-narrator text in the older country tradition: the narrator recalling his old home town, the small details of the place and the people he left behind, the impossibility of fully returning to a past that has shifted in his absence. Tony Rice’s lead vocal and the band’s tight contemporary-traditional arrangement give the recording its burnished surface. It works as a moderate-tempo vocal piece in G with a clear chorus harmony slot.
