“Before I Met You” is credited to Charles L. Seitz, Elmer Rader and Joe Lewis. The first record of it was made in Cincinnati in 1953 by Joe “Cannonball” Lewis, a singer who had been recording for MGM since 1951; the Gateway label put it out that September as the B-side of “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down” (Gateway 3006).
The lyric is a list of the singer’s old certainties, each one closed off by the title line. He thought he had seen pretty girls, never saw one he wanted for his own, thought he was “swingin’ the world by the tail,” wanted to ramble and stay free, and swore no woman could hold him. The last verse admits a worry: people tell him he must reap what he has sown, and he hopes they are wrong, since he once made plans to live alone.
Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it on 23 January 1955 at Castle Studio in Nashville. Flatt sang lead, with Curly Seckler on tenor and Scruggs on baritone; Flatt and Eddie Hill played guitars, Seckler mandolin, Scruggs banjo, Paul Warren fiddle and Jake Tullock bass. Columbia issued it on 20 June 1955 (21412), backed with Flatt’s “I’m Gonna Sleep with One Eye Open.”
Buck Ryan and Smitty Irvin put it on their 1965 Monument album Ballads & Bluegrass, with Irvin singing lead and Bill Harrell tenor. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton sang it as a duet at their very first recording session together, on 10 October 1967 at RCA Studio B in Nashville, and it appeared on their first joint album, Just Between You and Me, in January 1968. In December 1968, at Lemco Studios in Lexington, Kentucky, J. D. Crowe & the Kentucky Mountain Boys recorded it for Bluegrass Holiday, with Red Allen singing lead, Doyle Lawson tenor and Crowe baritone. Mandolinist Red Rector and guitarist Fred Smith included it on their 1969 County album Songs from the Heart of the Country, Smith singing, with Kenny Baker on fiddle.
