Bill Monroe wrote “The One I Love Is Gone” in 1955. According to Neil Rosenberg’s notes for Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard’s Smithsonian Folkways reissue, Monroe had never performed or published the song when, on a visit with the two women in the 1960s, he sang it for them. They liked it, so he gave it to them, and they published it under his name. They added a tenor part of their own.
Their recording, produced by Peter K. Siegel, was made in 1965 at Mastertone Studio in New York. Alice Gerrard (then Alice Foster) sang lead and played guitar. Hazel Dickens sang tenor and played string bass, with Lamar Grier on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin and Billy Baker on fiddle. It was meant for their second Folkways album, which, in Gerrard’s words, “sat in the can for eight years.” Won’t You Come and Sing for Me? finally came out in 1973. In the meantime the duo had sung it at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1966, and that performance appeared on Vanguard’s 2001 collection Newport Folk Festival: Best of Bluegrass, 1959–66.
The lyric is a farewell. The singer has no idea where to go or what to do, and says nothing makes any difference without the one they love. They will try to let that person be, and they say goodbye for the last time. In the refrain a bluebird sings its little song high on a mountainside, while the singer sighs and cries over the one who is gone.
Other singers have since taken it up. The Karl Shiflett & Big Country Show recorded it for Rebel in 1999, and the Meat Purveyors included it on Pain by Numbers (Bloodshot, 2004). Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy sang it on Adieu False Heart (2006), and Katie Melua on The House (2010). It is also on the Secret Sisters’ self-titled 2010 album and on the Price Sisters’ 2016 Rebel album. The band from the film The Broken Circle Breakdown performed it on Unbroken! Live in Concert (2014).
