The song listed here as “All About You” is the 1927 popular standard “I Told Them All About You,” written by the Tin Pan Alley songwriter Cliff Friend. It was published that year and recorded promptly by the period’s dance and vocal groups; decades later it remained current enough to become a chart hit in Australia for the British singer Donald Peers around 1950.
Like many well-crafted songs of the 1920s, it survived by moving between genres: a sweet, straightforward love lyric set to a melody that lent itself to almost any treatment. Acoustic and bluegrass musicians, with their long habit of mining the pre-war popular catalog, kept it in occasional circulation.
Doc Watson and David Grisman recorded it on their 1997 album Doc and Dawg, a relaxed meeting of two master acoustic players who delighted in older material of exactly this kind. Their version reintroduced a seventy-year-old popular song to listeners who knew it, if at all, only as a bluegrass and old-time curiosity.
