“Your Lone Journey” is credited to Doc Watson and his wife, Rosa Lee Watson, though the writing started with her. Doc told the story at a MerleFest remembrance of Rosa Lee: she was sweeping the house one Sunday morning, when their son Merle was four and their daughter Nancy was two, and kept humming something and stopping. Asked what she was doing, she said she was writing a song, and he told her he would try to find a guitar arrangement to go with it. The musician David Holt, who played with Doc for years, remembered Rosa Lee telling it differently: she was thinking about relatives who had died when the tune and words came to her as she sang, and she and Doc worked out the chords and the unusual harmony in the chorus. Holt also said she called it “Your Lone Journey,” not “Your Long Journey,” a title that appears on many recordings and credits.
The words are spoken to a loved one who is dying. God gave them years of happiness, the angels are calling, and the singer’s heart breaks as the other sets out on a journey alone. The days and nights will be empty without that person, but the singer keeps the memories of happy days and promises to walk hand in hand with them in heaven when their own time comes.
Doc and Rosa Lee sang it as a duet on The Watson Family, a 1963 Folkways recording, and Doc recorded it again for Sugar Hill on My Dear Old Southern Home (1991), with Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan and Jack Lawrence. John Hartford included it on Gum Tree Canoe (1984) and Tim and Mollie O’Brien on Take Me Back (1988). Robert Plant and Alison Krauss closed their album Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007) with it, and that album won Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammy Awards. Emmylou Harris has recorded it as well.
