This is my apology for NOT being an out-of-luck, down-at-the-heels, besotted hobo.  Jim Robeson brought in Lynn Morris and her bluegrass band, which, at the time, included Ron Stewart.  (He went on to play with J.D. Crowe and the New South, won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Banjo Player of the Year Award, formed The Boxcars, and is now holding forth with The Seldom Scene.)  Pretty good company to have kept! 

©1998 Steven E. Cutts (ASCAP) 
recorded in early-March 2000 at Bias Studios (recorded and mixed by Jim Robeson) 
on All Alone . . . But Hardly On My Own (available for purchase at iTunes, et al.)

Steve, acoustic guitar & lead vocal 
Robert Bartley, harmony vocal & tambourine 
John Lewis, electric bass  
Lynn Morris, banjo  
Ron Stewart, mandolin & fiddle 


I've never rambled far from home. 

Never chased my dreams when my dreams have flown. 

Never had to wake from a night in a cold, hard rain. 

An adventurous life I cannot claim; 

I've never been a ramblin' man. 

Never crossed the law, never spent the night locked in a jail. 

Never hopped an outbound freight and rumbled down the rails. 

I've never known the brotherhood of lost and desperate males. 

I've never been a ramblin' man. 

                                                                                    

Never hit a man in anger in a drunken barroom fight. 

Wild women have not tempted me to stay the night. 

I've never lost a paycheck playing cards or rolling dice. 

I've never been a gamblin' man. 

I get the shading wrong everytime I try to sing the blues; 

You need a smoldering cigarette and a half-downed glass of booze. 

I've got no whiskey-darkened voice to sing sad country tunes. 

I get those ramblin' songs all wrong 

                        

It takes a ramblin' man to sing a ramblin' song . . . 

I've never been a ramblin' man. 

I'll bet I'm not the only one to've lived the life I have: 

To have had my share of luck and seen more good than bad. 

I should sing a song of jubilation and be glad 

I've never been  a ramblin' man.