Article Contributed by Mountain Home Music Company
Published on 2026-04-05
After the lonesome mountain feel of the old-time flavored “There Where The River Rolls Around,” the durable hitmaking Lonesome River Band tackles the flip side of the string band style with a raucous performance of “Pretty Little Widow,” a comic rave-up that was first dished up by Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers in 1928.
That’s not the immediate antecedent of the Lonesome River Band’s take on the tune, though. Instead, notes bandleader and award-winning banjoist Sammy Shelor, “Jesse Smathers brought this song to our attention from a video of Stringbean on the Porter Wagoner show from the 1960s. We all love Stringbean’s music, and it was a song I had not heard before. He was backed by Porter’s country band and the electric guitar had a great part in the song. So it was an obvious choice of tunes for this project; Rod Riley on the Tele captures the vintage sound of that era of country music.”
Indeed, with Shelor’s kickoff translating the legendary entertainer’s frenetic clawhammer style into powerhouse bluegrass picking, the Lonesome River Band’s “Pretty Little Widow” moves along at a breakneck pace from start to finish, as Smathers knocks out the lyric’s portrait of a desirable woman with gusto and the ensemble’s pickers — mandolinist Adam Miller, fiddler Mike Hartgrove, the aforementioned Riley and Shelor himself — leap into action between each stanza.
From start to finish, Lonesome River Band’s “Pretty Little Widow” is a triumphant exploration of the glorious music individuality that’s inextricably woven into country music’s roots, bringing to life yet again Shelor’s old dictum that the group plays bluegrass music with rock’n’roll energy.
"Pretty Little Widow" is streaming in Dolby Atmos spatial audio on Apple Music, Amazon Music and TIDAL. Listen to it HERE.
