Album
Carter Stanley wrote “This Weary Heart You Stole Away,” and the Stanley Brothers cut it on 9 August 1953, in the session that opened their years with Mercury. Carter sang the lead and played guitar, Ralph took the tenor and the banjo, and the band behind them was Jim Williams on mandolin, Art Stamper on fiddle and George Shuffler on bass. Mercury issued it that September as 70217, backed with Ralph’s “I’m Lonesome Without You.” The label carried a second title in parentheses — “Wake Up, Sweetheart,” the line that opens the refrain — and that subtitle still turns up on reissues of the Mercury sides.
The lyric is a night-long vigil. The singer waits up for a woman who does not come home, falls asleep at daybreak to drive the blues away, and then hears her crying in her sleep and saying she has found somebody new. His response is to pretend he heard nothing: he will go on as though he could never love anyone else. Only in the last verse does he put the question directly — how can you treat me like you do, when I have never done you wrong — and the answer he gives is that his heart will always worship her, and still each night he is left alone.
The song has stayed in the tradition ever since. Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs recorded it on 29 June 1971 for the Rebel LP Second Generation Bluegrass (SLP 1504), with Whitley taking Carter’s lead and Skaggs the harmony; Roy Lee Centers played banjo, Curly Ray Cline fiddle and Jack Cooke bass. The Seldom Scene put it on Act 4 in 1979. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded their own version in 1981, which Rounder released in 2009 on Can’t You Hear the Mountains Calling?, and the 1996 tribute album The Stanley Tradition: Tribute to a Bluegrass Legacy includes the song among its Stanley Brothers material.
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