"Rocky Top" is an American country and bluegrass song written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant in 1967 and first recorded by the Osborne Brothers later that same year. The song, which is a city-dweller's lamentation over the loss of a simpler and freer existence in the hills of Tennessee, is one of Tennessee's eight official state songs and has been recorded by dozens of artists from multiple musical genres worldwide since its publication. In U.S. college athletics, "Rocky Top" is associated with the Tennessee Volunteers of the University of Tennessee, whose Pride of the Southland Band has played a marching band version of the song at the school's sporting events since the early 1970s.
The Osborne Brothers' 1967 bluegrass version of the song reached number thirty-three on the U.S. Country charts, and country singer Lynn Anderson's 1970 version peaked at number seventeen. In 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ranked "Rocky Top" number seven on its list of 100 Songs of the South.
Read more about Rocky Top: Background, Notable Covers
Famous quotes containing the words rocky and/or top:
“Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O, ‘tis a parlous boy,
Bold, quick, ingenious, forward, capable.
He is all the mother’s, from the top to toe.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)