Musicians
- Ralph Stanley — Lead Vocals, Banjo
- Carter Stanley — Guitar
- William "Curley" Lambert — Mandolin
- Art Stamper — Fiddle
- George Shuffler — Bass
“Wild Bill Jones” is an American ballad of unknown authorship. G. Malcolm Laws listed it as E10 in Native American Balladry, and it is number 2246 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
The singer, out for a walk, comes on Wild Bill Jones beside his sweetheart and tells him to leave her alone. Bill answers that at twenty-one he is too old to take orders, so the singer draws his revolver and shoots him. Dying, Bill throws his arms around the girl and asks her to take him home. The killer then tells the officers to put the handcuffs on him and says he has no friends or family to pay his bail. He calls for a bottle to be passed around: Bill has seen his last day, and the killer expects his own to follow.
Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles printed a version they had taken down from Mrs. Viney Norton on 16 August 1916 in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Eva Davis recorded it for Columbia in April 1924, at the session she shared with Samantha Bumgarner. Wade Mainer recorded it on 2 August 1937, with Zeke Morris on guitar. The folklorist Louis Watson Chappell recorded Kate Toney singing it unaccompanied in Logan County, West Virginia, on 9 August 1940. During the folk revival, J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers cut it for Arhoolie at Concord, North Carolina, in April 1963, and Dock Boggs recorded it for Folkways on 14 December 1963.
The Stanley Brothers recorded it at the King studio in Cincinnati on 15 January 1961. Ralph Stanley sang lead and played banjo, with Carter Stanley on guitar, Curley Lambert on mandolin, Art Stamper on fiddle and George Shuffler on bass. It came out that November on Sing the Songs They Like Best. The Kentucky Colonels, with Clarence White on guitar and Roland White on mandolin, played it as an instrumental on Appalachian Swing! (World Pacific, 1964).
Doc and Merle Watson played it at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 11 October 1978, and the performance came out on Live & Pickin’ (United Artists, 1979). Hot Rize included it on Radio Boogie (Flying Fish, 1981), with Tim O’Brien singing lead and Pete Wernick and Nick Forster on harmony. On Alison Krauss and Union Station’s Two Highways (Rounder, 1989), Jeff White sang lead, with Krauss singing tenor and playing fiddle.
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