“A Valley of Peace,” usually shortened to “Valley of Peace,” was written by Charlie Monroe (1903–1975), Bill Monroe’s older brother and his partner in the Monroe Brothers, who went on to lead his own band, the Kentucky Pardners. The earliest recording of it comes from a 1944 broadcast of the Noonday Jamboree, issued by County Records in 1974 on Charlie Monroe on the Noonday Jamboree 1944: Charlie sings lead, with Lester Flatt, then his mandolin player, singing tenor.
Monroe cut it for RCA Victor on 1 February 1949 in the Fox Theatre Building in Atlanta, with Orne Osborne on guitar, Red Rector on mandolin and Lavelle Coy on bass; Charles Grean and Steve Sholes produced. Victor released it in August 1949 on the other side of “Our Mansion Is Ready.”
The song is about home. Its refrain calls the valley a place where no sorrows are known, so peaceful it seems like heaven, and names it the singer’s home. The verses walk through a run-down cabin — a broken lock on the door, cracks in the floor, light shining through honeysuckle at an old window — along with a rustic well, a sweetheart named Nell who misses him, and an empty rocking chair by the fire. To the singer the shack is a palace, and he wants to go back.
Two of Monroe’s former sidemen recorded it in later decades. Red Rector, his 1949 mandolinist, recorded it with Bill Clifton at the WAM studio in Elmshorn, Germany, on 7 March 1976 for In Europe. Curly Seckler, who played mandolin for Monroe in 1946, cut it with the Nashville Grass on 27 November 1978 for No Doubt About It, and again for Down in Caroline (Copper Creek, 2005), singing tenor to Dudley Connell’s lead. Don Stover recorded it for Rounder’s Things in Life (1972) with David Grisman on mandolin; Jim and Jesse included it on Homeland Harmony (1983), and the Lynn Morris Band on its 1990 Rounder debut, with Marshall Wilborn singing lead.
