Musicians
- Roy Lee Centers — Lead Vocals, Guitar
- Ricky Lee — Guitar
- Ralph Stanley — Tenor Vocals, Banjo
- "Curly" Ray Cline — Fiddle
- Jack Cooke — Bass
“Gold Watch and Chain” was first recorded by the Carter Family — Sara, Maybelle and A. P. Carter — for Victor on 17 June 1933. Victor issued it on 23821 with “Give Me Roses While I Live” on the other side, and the same recording also came out on Montgomery Ward 7354. Later records usually credit A. P. Carter as the writer.
Part of the song is older. In 1879 W. F. Shaw published “Is There No Kiss for Me Tonight,” a song and chorus with words and music by Thomas P. Westendorf. The Carters’ opening verse takes its lines from the second half of Westendorf’s second verse, about having nothing to cheer a poor heart and asking to be told they will never part. Their last verse reworks his chorus, which asks why the loved one’s heart has grown cold and ends on the title question. The pawn chorus and the verse about returning gifts have no counterpart in the 1879 song, and Rounder’s 1998 CD of the Carters’ 1933–34 Victor sides credits the song to Westendorf.
The singer pleads with a lover who has turned cold. Without you this world would seem sad, the first verse runs; the chorus offers to pawn the gold watch and chain, a gold diamond ring, even the heart in the singer’s bosom, if the lover will only say the words of love again. Another verse hands back every gift except a ring, a lock of hair and a card with a picture on it — “a face that is false but is fair.”
Maybelle Carter came back to the song more than once. She sang it with the New Lost City Ramblers at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963, and she recorded it twice as a soloist: for a 1960 single on Top Rank (2080) and in Nashville in January 1965. A. P. Carter recorded it again in the 1950s with the Phipps Family, for a release on ARC. The New Lost City Ramblers included it on Rural Delivery No. 1 (Verve/Folkways, 1965). Ralph Stanley recorded it on 23 March 1973 in Clinton, Maryland, with Roy Lee Centers singing lead and Stanley on tenor, for A Man and His Music (Rebel, 1974). Emmylou Harris recorded it in July 1979 for Roses in the Snow (Warner Bros., 1980), singing it with Ricky Skaggs and Linda Ronstadt. In January 1981 Red Allen cut it in Nashville for Family & Friends (Folkways), with Marty Stuart on mandolin and Vassar Clements on fiddle. Stanley came back to it for Clinch Mountain Country (Rebel, 1998), this time singing lead with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on harmony.
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