“Where the Wild River Rolls” was written by Bob Amos and recorded by Hot Rize for their 1990 Sugar Hill album Take It Home at Colorado Sound Recording Studios. Tim O’Brien sang lead and played mandolin and fiddle, with Charles Sawtelle on guitar, Pete Wernick on banjo and Nick Forster on bass.
Amos grew up singing in choirs, took up guitar at about twelve and banjo soon after, and earned a master’s degree in geology in Arizona before moving to Colorado in 1982 to work as a geologist. He formed Front Range, a quartet based in the Denver and Fort Collins area, in 1984 with mandolinist Mike Lantz; the band signed with Sugar Hill and kept going until 2006, and Amos wrote most of its songs. He later moved to Vermont, where he runs a recording studio. Bluegrass Today’s profile of him notes that Hot Rize was one of the few bands to record an Amos song. He recorded it himself on his 2012 album Borrowed Time (Bristlecone 1007).
The song is a lament for a lost love. The singer asks where he can find peace of mind, tells of five lonely years spent waiting for his lover to come home, and, with the cost of her love weighing on him, says he is bound for the wild river and the tall pines.
