Songfacts®:

• This haunting, bluesy song finds Robert Plant searching high and low for love. He goes down to the river, travels the highway, climbs a mountain, goes out on the ocean, but remains alone and lonesome. As Plant pleads for someone that will love him, Alison Krauss' vocals flicker in and out in the background. The track's producer, T-Bone Burnett, also contributes backing vocals.
• Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recorded "High and Lonesome" for their second album, Raise The Roof. A co-write between Plant and T-Bone Burnett, this is the one original song on the set. Burnett also produced the pair's first album together, 2007's Raising Sand.
• The musicians on the song are:
  
  Electric guitar: T-Bone Burnett
  Guitar: Marc Ribot
  Pedal steel: Russell Pahl
  Bass: Dennis Crouch
  Bass accordion: Jeff Taylor
  Drums: Jay Bellerose
  Mellotron: T-Bone Burnett and Krauss' brother, Viktor Krauss
• Plant, Krauss and Burnett recorded Raise the Roof at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville. They completed it weeks before the COVID shutdown.
• The song arrived spontaneously. "We were doing this stuff in between tracks and T-Bone played some rhythm and I went, 'Wait a minute!'" Plant recalled to English newspaper The Sun. "I flicked my lyric book round and there it all was, the story of my life in one easy song."