Freeborn Man

Keith Allison and Mark Lindsay wrote the song. Allison was the bass player of Paul Revere and the Raiders from 1968 to 1975. Tony Rice opened his first solo album, Guitar (1973), with it. That record was first issued in Japan by Red Clay as Got Me a Martin Guitar. The track runs 2:49 and was recorded at Lemco Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, with Larry Rice on mandolin, J.D. Crowe on banjo and Bobby Slone on bass.

At the Merle Watson festival

Sam Bush is not the leader on this performance. It is a live all-star version led by Tony Rice at the Merle Watson Memorial Bluegrass Festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in April 1992, now MerleFest. A fan tape listing gives the Tony Rice All-Stars for the festival as Rice on guitar and vocals, Bela Fleck on banjo, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Bush on mandolin and vocals, and Mark Schatz on bass, and it opens that set with this song. The set was filmed for the Pickin' for Merle broadcasts, and fans taped the sound from cable showings in the mid-1990s. After Rice died in 2020, one fan on a forum linked this video as one for the ages.

The upload in the hypersongs web is that 1992 MerleFest performance, with Bush as a sideman, not a Sam Bush studio recording.