A Simple Song Gets Complex With A Second Look

I love this song, but I was hard-pressed to say what's extraordinary about it until I listened -- really listened -- to the lyrics.

"I fell in love in Cincinnati," Steve Gulley sings, following with the standard tale of a naive young man falling prey to a citified gold-digger, and a chorus that you wouldn't write home about. The final verse goes like this:

I wish that I was in Kentucky
With mama, and papa dear
But mama's gone now, and so is papa
And Kentucky's a long way from here

And, all of a sudden, the chorus makes horrible sense:

It's a lonesome feeling when you're traveling
Down a lonesome road, down a lonesome road
Nobody cares a thing about you
It's a heavy load, it's a heavy load.

The lonesome road is the Hillbilly Highway, both literal and metaphorical, that Appalachian migrants took to escape the poverty at home for the jobs to be found in the wealthy, industrial north.

More than one bluegrass pioneer made this journey -- Bill Monroe, Red Allen, and The Osborne Brothers, among others. Like this song's protagonist, The Osborne Brothers journeyed from Kentucky to Ohio. Eventually, they found musical success. Without the family, culture, and institutions that had sustained them back home, they found their share of loneliness and isolation, too.

This is Steve Gulley, Dale Ann Bradley, and Debbie Gulley with "Lonesome Feeling".