Musicians
“Why Did You Wander” dates from Lester Flatt’s years as Bill Monroe’s lead singer. Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys recorded it at WBBM’s studio in Chicago on 16 September 1946, the first time Monroe recorded with Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Flatt sang lead and Monroe tenor, with Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle and Cedric Rainwater on bass. Bluegrass Today’s “On This Day” series calls it an up-tempo Flatt composition and the first duet the two men recorded. Neither of the two takes was clean, and the performance stayed in the vaults until New World Records put it on the anthology Hills & Home: Thirty Years of Bluegrass in 1976.
Long before then, Flatt and Scruggs had made it a record of their own. They cut it with the Foggy Mountain Boys on 9 November 1952 at Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel, with Flatt on lead and guitar, Curly Seckler singing tenor and playing mandolin, Benny Martin on fiddle and Jody Rainwater on bass. Columbia released it in April 1953 (21091), backed with “Thinking About You.” That label credits the song to Flatt and Monroe, while Monroe’s own reissues name Monroe alone.
The singer asks his darling why she ever left the mountain home where they were happy together. He remembers her waiting for him by moonlight in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, and he admits how lonely he is without her. He ends by wishing her happiness wherever she goes and hoping they will be together again in heaven.
Larry Sparks & the Lonesome Ramblers recorded it in 1973 at Old Homestead’s studio in Brighton, Michigan, for The Lonesome Sounds of Larry Sparks (1974). Flatt remade it with the Nashville Grass for A Living Legend (CMH, 1976), recorded at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Seckler back on mandolin and Marty Stuart in the band. Joe Val & the New England Bluegrass Boys put it on Bound to Ride (Rounder, 1979). In 2006 Seckler sang tenor on it again, this time behind Dudley Connell’s lead, for his own Copper Creek album Bluegrass, Don’t You Know. Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder recorded it for Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass: Tribute to 1946 and 1947 (2008), and the Earls of Leicester cut it at the Butcher Shoppe in Nashville on 15 February 2016 for Rattle & Roar (Rounder).
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