Your Long Journey

"Your Long Journey", sometimes titled "Your Lone Journey", was first released on The Watson Family (Folkways, 1963) as a duet by Doc and Rosa Lee Watson, track six, 2:31, with Doc on guitar. It is addressed to a dying loved one and concerns death, mourning and lost love. Credits differ: it is credited to Doc and Rosa Lee Watson on the Emmylou Harris and Plant and Krauss albums, to Rosa Lee alone in her Bluegrass Today obituary, which says she wrote it.

Two accounts of its making survive. Doc told a MerleFest audience that Rosa Lee was sweeping on a Sunday morning, humming and then stopping, and that she said she was writing a song, and he offered to work out a guitar arrangement; their son Merle was about four. David Holt tells it as her thinking of dead relatives as the tune and words came, then the couple working out chords and an unusual harmony in the chorus. When Doc recorded it again for My Dear Old Southern Home (Sugar Hill, 1991) it was track three, 2:45.

The song was covered by John Hartford (1984), Tim and Mollie O'Brien (1988), and Emmylou Harris on Thirteen (Warner Bros., February 1986, recorded November 1985, produced by Harris and Paul Kennerley, 3:44), where it was also the B-side of "If I Had My Heart Set on You". Robert Plant and Alison Krauss closed Raising Sand with it (Rounder, October 23, 2007, produced by T Bone Burnett, 3:55, with Riley Baugus on banjo, Norman Blake on guitar and Mike Seeger on autoharp), an album that reached number two on the Billboard 200 and won five Grammys, including album of the year. Holt remembered Rosa Lee being excited when they recorded it. Bill Frisell plays an instrumental version on I Am a Pilgrim (2023). Which version our upload is, the 1963 duet or a later one, was not confirmed.