“You Are My Sunshine” is among the most widely sung American songs of the twentieth century, though its authorship has never been settled. It was copyrighted in 1940 under the names of Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell, but Davis — a country singer who twice served as governor of Louisiana — is generally understood to have bought the song and its rights rather than written it, a common practice in the prewar music business.
The earliest recordings date to 1939: the Pine Ridge Boys cut it for Bluebird that August, and the Rice Brothers’ Gang followed for Decca in September. Researchers have proposed other origins still — one account credits Oliver Hood, a musician from LaGrange, Georgia, with writing it in the early 1930s — and the record is tangled enough that the song is often treated as effectively traditional. Davis’s own 1940 recording made it a hit, and Louisiana later adopted it as a state song.
Though it began as a country hit, “You Are My Sunshine” passed long ago into the shared old-time, gospel, and bluegrass songbook, its deceptively bright melody carrying a lyric of loss and pleading. Norman Blake’s spare, solo-guitar rendition closed the 2000 film soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the album that drew a vast new audience to traditional acoustic music.
