Most children learn this song before they learn to read. That is the trick of it. The melody sits inside three chords, the range fits any voice in the circle, and the last verse turns the whole thing into a song about losing someone. Bluegrass bands have played it for decades. Nobody can prove who wrote it.
Where it came from
Two records came before the famous one. The Pine Ridge Boys, a close-harmony duo of Doug Spivey and Marvin Taylor, cut it on August 22, 1939 for Bluebird (B-8263). That record listed no composer at all. The Rice Brothers Gang recorded it three weeks later on September 13, 1939 for Decca (5763), and their label credited Paul Rice.
Rice said the song was his. He said he wrote it in 1937 after a long letter from a young woman in South Carolina who called him her sunshine. The Rice Brothers Gang had moved from Atlanta to Shreveport and worked at radio station KWKH. Jimmie Davis worked in the same town. The Shreveport Times later reported that Davis and Charles Mitchell came to the station in 1939, found Rice short of cash for his wife’s hospital bill, and bought the song for thirty-five dollars.
A second claim points to Georgia. In November 1990, Chronicles magazine ran an article by Theodore Pappas titled “The Theft of an American Classic.” It reported that family and associates of Oliver Hood of LaGrange, Georgia said Hood wrote the song in the early 1930s and first performed it at a 1933 Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. Hood’s descendants have repeated that account since. Rice himself said at least twenty people claimed the song at one point or another. No document settles the question, so treat all of it as claim rather than fact.
The paperwork is the part nobody disputes. The copyright was registered on January 30, 1940 to Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell, published by Southern Music Publishing. Davis recorded his version on February 5, 1940 at Decca’s New York studios, released as Decca 5813. Sources disagree on that session date, and a few place it days earlier or weeks later. Davis then rode the song into office. He served as governor of Louisiana from 1944 to 1948 and again from 1960 to 1964, using it at rallies both times. Louisiana named it a state song in 1977, sharing the honor with “Give Me Louisiana.” A 2021 act dropped the other title and left this one as the sole state song.
How it works
The form is a sixteen bar strain, and the verse and chorus use the same changes. In Nashville numbers the shape is 1, 1, 1, 1, then 4, 4, 1, 1, then 4, 4, 1, 1, then 1, 5, 1, 1. Three chords, and the 5 appears once. In G that reads G, C, and D. The harmonic rhythm is slow. A player can hold one chord for four bars and still be right, which is why teachers reach for this song first.
Most jams call it in G. That key suits banjo players and leaves the fiddle open strings to work with. The Idaho Bluegrass Association teaches it in E at its beginner jam. Norman Blake recorded it in F sharp. Any of those work, because the melody stays inside an octave and asks nothing hard of a singer.
Bands treat it two ways. Played fast with a driving break, it is a warm-up number and a crowd song. Played slow, the last verse does its work. NPR noted that the closing verse gets dropped when the song serves as a children’s rhyme, and that singing it turns a sweet promise into a fear of being left. The Dead South took that second reading to its end in 2022 and made the tune sound like a threat. Both songs live inside the same sixteen bars.
One note on rights. The copyright was registered in 1940 and renewed in 1967, which keeps the song protected in the United States until 2036. This page gives history, form, and chord numbers. It prints no lyrics, notation, or tab. For tunes with no such limit, see the songbook.
Recordings worth hearing
The two 1939 sides are the place to start. The Pine Ridge Boys version on Bluebird is two guitars and yodels. The Rice Brothers Gang cut on Decca is a fuller band record from a New York session. Jimmie Davis recorded his in February 1940 with Charles Mitchell’s orchestra, and that is the record everyone else copied. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2012, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame gave the song its Towering Song award in 2000.
Ray Charles moved it somewhere else in 1962 on Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume Two. His version reached number one on the R&B chart and number seven on the pop chart. Davis noticed. A December 1962 letter from Davis, then governor, discussing the Ray Charles version now sits in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
For the string band side, Norman Blake sang it with one guitar on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, produced by T-Bone Burnett in 2000. That record also carries Man of Constant Sorrow and Keep on the Sunny Side, and it put this song back in front of an acoustic audience. Morgane Stapleton sang it with Chris Stapleton on Southern Family in 2016 and pulled it toward blues. The Dead South cut it for Easy Listening for Jerks, Part 1 in 2022. Four readings, one set of chords.
Sources
Facts on this page come from the Library of Congress essay on the 1940 Davis recording, the National Recording Registry 2012 induction list, the Wikipedia entry on the song, the American Songwriter piece on who wrote it, the Songwriters Hall of Fame profile, and the LSU Press page for Robert Mann’s book on the song.
Louisiana’s designation comes from Louisiana Revised Statutes 49:155. Recording details come from the Wikipedia page for Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume Two, the NPR write-up of the Stapleton version, Bluegrass Today on The Dead South, and the Smithsonian listing for a 1962 Davis letter. Key and chord details come from the Idaho Bluegrass Association beginner jam page and the Pickers Guide entry for Norman Blake’s recording.