Walls Of Time

A song co-written by Bill Monroe and Peter Rowan during Rowan’s 1964–1967 tenure with the Blue Grass Boys, though not recorded until after Rowan had left the band. The first commercial release was a 1970 recording by Randall Collins, Curtis Blackwell and the Dixie Bluegrass Boys; Monroe’s own version with his son James was cut March 21, 1972 and released on the Father & Son album in 1973. The lyric is a meditation on mortality and reunion in death — wind across the mountain, the grave of a darling in the valley, the wall of time between the living and the dead. It has been recorded by Emmylou Harris with the Nash Ramblers, the Johnson Mountain Boys, and Peter Rowan himself on his 1982 Sugar Hill album Walls of Time.