“The One I Love Is Gone” was written by Bill Monroe, the founder of bluegrass, in the mid-1950s. Monroe never recorded it himself; it was Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard who first put it on record, in the early 1970s.
The song is a bluegrass ballad of loss. The one the singer loves is gone, and the lyric stays with the plain ache of that absence — sorrow and longing set against a slow, mournful tune.
Dickens and Gerrard, pioneering women in bluegrass, gave the song its first recording and helped bring it into the repertoire.
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