If Your Hair's Too Long (There's Sin In Your Heart)

 This one's a little bit of a mystery. After The Billy stats, I'll talk about why. This is a quartet vocal that bmfsdb.com lists as 'traditional', probably because there is nothing online indicating the origin. Speaking personally, I'm always happy when the boys break this one out. First off, it means we're in a single mic segment, where they're playing old-school bluegrass style. The first time I saw them play it was Red Rocks night 2 in 2023. The night before was rainy, cold & miserable, forever to ber known as "Rain Rocks". For night 2, I'm pretty sure the plan was to open with "I Can See Clearly Now The Rain Is Gone", but fate, in the form of rig problems, intervened. After a few minutes of standing & waiting, they made the call to get the single mic & pick a few. If Your Hair's Too Long, was the last one before they went back to the original set. A mighty cheer went up for the line "You'll live a life of fear & dread if you listen to the Grateful Dead" as it always does.

BMFSDB.com says that (as of this writing), Billy Strings has played If Your Hair's Too Long 26 time, with it appearing in about 2.6% of shows. 2023 seems to have been the big year so far, with 9 plays.

The Song

If Your Hair's Too Long (There's Sin In Your Heart) sounds like an old gospel quartet song from the '60's or '70's, I couldn't find anything on discogs or secondhandsongs about it. When I looked on Youtube I found this (in addition to a bunch of BMFS vids).

Not particularly helpful, or good. After some more searching, I found this clip.

So this is interesting. LaVerne Tripp sang for the Blue Ridge Quartet, a southern gospel group. Otis Forrest was their producer for a bunch of records. In the clip, Edith Tripp says to Otis "you produced it" and Otis goes on to talk about how heavily bootlegged the song was. It certainly sounds like something the Blue Ridge Quartet could have performed, but I just can't find it online.

I went through the track listing on every one of their albums & singles I could find, but no joy. If anyone knows the original recording, please leave a comment,