“Those Memories of You” was written by Alan O’Bryant and recorded by the Nashville Bluegrass Band on their 1986 Sugar Hill debut album My Native Home. O’Bryant, a co-founder of the Nashville Bluegrass Band, has built one of the more distinctive bluegrass songwriting catalogues of the late 20th century; this song is one of his most-covered original compositions.
The recording most contemporary listeners know is Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris’s 1987 Trio album version. The Trio album, recorded over five years and released by Warner Bros. in 1987, was one of the most successful country-vocal collaborative albums of the period; it sold over four million copies and won a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. The Trio’s three-part vocal arrangement gave O’Bryant’s song its definitive popular reading.
The lyric is a memory-and-yearning text: the narrator unable to escape the pull of remembered intimacy, the small details of a former relationship still capable of breaking through years later. The harmonic shape leaves obvious slots for tenor and high-baritone harmony, and the song works as a slow-to-moderate vocal feature with a strong three-part harmony slot on the chorus.
