Freeborn Man

Keith Allison and Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders wrote it. Search listings credit Glen Campbell's version on A New Place in the Sun (1968) and Paul Revere and the Raiders' on Alias Pink Puzz (1969), and a 1979 recording credited to the South Loomis Quickstep with O'Connor; we could not fetch those pages to confirm them. Tony Rice's version opens his first solo album Guitar (1973), recorded at Lemco Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, with Larry Rice on mandolin, Bobby Slone on bass and violin and J.D. Crowe on banjo; O'Connor is not on that record.

The performance we hold is a live MerleFest set with Rice, O'Connor, Bela Fleck and Sam Bush. A video titled for MerleFest 1992 credits Rice on guitar, O'Connor on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Bush on mandolin, Fleck on banjo and Mark Schatz on bass, and O'Connor's own Facebook page posted it; whether our upload is that performance is not confirmed, and the 1988 MerleFest is also possible. In a 2019 interview with Jan Johansson, Rice pointed to footage of that group playing "Freeborn Man" and "Nine Pound Hammer" and called O'Connor's fiddling absolutely mind-blowing. MerleFest began in 1988 in memory of Eddy Merle Watson, Doc Watson's son, and is held in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. We found no chart history for the song and no commentary by O'Connor.