“Used to Be” was recorded by Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick on their 1996 Rounder duo album Together. The Lewis/Kallick pairing — veterans of the West Coast bluegrass scene since the 1980s, with Lewis on lead vocal and fiddle and Kallick on harmony and guitar — produced one of the more distinctive duo recordings of the mid-1990s acoustic women’s-vocal era.
The song was written by Bill Monroe, who recorded it with his Blue Grass Boys before Lewis and Kallick brought it into their acoustic duo repertoire. The lyric is a what-used-to-be reflection: the narrator looking back on a relationship’s earlier easier days, the small details that no longer fit the partners they have become.
Lewis’s lead vocal — clean, slightly throaty in the lower register — carries the lyric’s quiet melancholy, and Kallick’s harmony adds the higher edge that the duo’s vocal arrangement made distinctive. The harmonic shape is open and modal-flavoured, the tempo sits in the moderate range, and the song works as a vocal feature in G with a clear fiddle break.
