“Doin’ My Time” was written by Jimmie Skinner, the Kentucky-born country and bluegrass singer-songwriter, and first recorded by Skinner himself in the late 1940s — with sources placing the original recording variously at 1946 and 1948. The song is a prison narrative in the country-blues idiom — the narrator serving out a sentence and counting the days — that fit naturally into both the early bluegrass and rockabilly catalogs.
The song’s bluegrass-canon moment came in 1957, when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded their version with the Foggy Mountain Boys. The Flatt & Scruggs reading carried the song to a wide bluegrass audience and effectively fixed the canonical arrangement that subsequent acts have followed.
“Doin’ My Time” also crossed into the rockabilly and Sun Records orbits through Johnny Cash, who recorded it for Sun. Cash’s version drew on the same prison-song tradition the song had emerged from and gave it a country-music second life. The song remains a regular call-out at bluegrass jam sessions for any singer who can deliver the prison-blues phrasing convincingly, and it sits comfortably alongside Skinner’s other most-covered composition, “Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler.”
