Adam and Amy Pope’s Roan Mountain is a song that drifts over the ridgelines of time, and it’s one that Adam says, “came from the mountain.”
This song rides on the fog, covering the hills and haunting the hollers. It’s a track colored by mountain souls, souls who understand what these hills hold and hear the words they breathe, souls who see the one walking in that deep, hanging fog before sunrise burns his path off the mountains.
Roan Mountain places you under a darkened, rain-gray sky, way up on the Carolina line as fog billows around mountain peaks rising through earth-bound clouds where a lone, ghostly figure roams. David Johnson’s fiddle wraps the melody around you like a cool breeze blowing mist through the trees, and Amy Pope’s vocals bring raindrops to your eyes, the same ones that haunt the hollers when Roan Mountain’s ghost cries. And when the harmonies hit on the chorus, you can envision the outline of a man wandering through the clouds that settle between damp slopes and creek-lined ravines. Listen close, and you may just meet the ghost of Roan Mountain yourself.
Adam shared the story of how Roan Mountain found him while he was riding through the Carolina mountains. He’d been doing relief work in North Carolina for months after Hurricane Helene, and even sang one of his original songs, Five Hundred Year Flood, at a vigil in Asheville held just three weeks after Helene hit.
“It’s a long story how all this happened, but it led to me driving up around Roan Mountain one day when the fog was thick, and I began to sing these lines out of nowhere:
‘He’s a ghost now and he’s roamin’ ’round Roan Mountain.’
I kept driving as this new, original chorus kept repeating in my head, and I wrote the verses as I drove back to where I live around Nashville. When I got home, I grabbed the guitar, and the song was done. It literally came from the mountain as I drove by it.”
The track was recorded at the Shop Studio in Candler, North Carolina, and was produced by Darin Aldridge. It features Amy on lead vocals and Adam on harmony and guitar. Darin plays mandolin, guitar, and adds the second harmony part, David Johnson plays those lonesome fiddle and dobro lines, and Tim Surrett holds down the upright bass part.
“Amy and I have played traditional country for years, but we went full on bluegrass with this track,” Adam said.
Roan Mountain is available to broadcasters via Get It Played and AirPlay Direct, and is available for download on all streaming platforms.
