“Any Old Time” is a song by Jimmie Rodgers, the Mississippi-born performer often called the father of country music. Rodgers wrote and recorded it around 1930, during the prolific final years of a career cut short by tuberculosis, and like much of his work it blends country sentiment with the phrasing and feel of the blues and popular song.
The lyric is a relaxed, bittersweet invitation, the narrator telling a former love that she can come back to him any old time she chooses. That easy, swinging quality kept the song in circulation long after Rodgers’s death, and it later reached new listeners through a well-known 1970s recording by Maria Muldaur.
Rodgers’s songs have always been foundational material for bluegrass and acoustic musicians. Tony Rice recorded “Any Old Time” on his 1983 album Church Street Blues, a mostly solo set of voice and guitar, where the song’s loose, jazz-tinged charm suited his clear singing and fluid flatpicking.
