Lost Highway (Leon Payne song)

"Lost Highway" is a country music song written and recorded by blind country singer-songwriter Leon Payne in 1948. It was released in October 1948 on Nashville-based Bullet label.

In the early days of Leon Payne's career, he used to travel from one place to another, trying to find jobs wherever he could. Once he was in California hitchhiking to Alba, Texas, to visit his sick mother, he was unable to get a ride and finally got help from The Salvation Army. He wrote "Lost Highway" on the edge of the road while waiting for a ride. Payne wrote hundreds of country songs in a prolific career that lasted from 1941 until his death in 1969. He is perhaps best known for his hits "I Love You Because", "You've Still Got a Place in My Heart," and for the two songs that Hank Williams recorded: "Lost Highway" and "They'll Never Take Her Love from Me." Payne released his version in October 1948.

As Williams' biographer Colin Escott observes, "In recent years, 'Lost Highway' has been the title of several books, a stage show, a record label, and a television series. It's seen as one of Hank's defining records, if not a defining moment in country music, which makes it ironic that it barely dented the charts on release and doubly ironic that it's not even one of Hank's songs." Although he did not write the song, "Lost Highway" was a natural for Williams, the song's combination of perdition and misogyny sounding "like pages torn from his diary." Williams recorded the song with Fred Rose producing and backing on the session from Dale Potter (fiddle), Don Davis (steel guitar), Zeb Turner (lead guitar), Clyde Baum (mandolin), Jack Shook (rhythm guitar), and probably Ernie Newton (bass).

Hank Williams Jr. refers to the song in his own song All my Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down), with "I think I know what my father meant, when he sang about a lost highway".

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