“Hold Whatcha Got” was written by Jimmy Martin and first recorded by Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys in 1959, in the period when the band’s lineup featured a young J.D. Crowe on banjo. The Martin/Crowe-era Sunny Mountain Boys produced a string of recordings that effectively defined the “hard-driving Martin sound,” and this is one of the cuts that exemplifies it.
The lyric is a possessive love song with a slightly unusual gait: the narrator urging his sweetheart to hold whatever she’s got and not give it away, the chorus phrased almost as advice to a third party rather than a direct address. Martin’s lead vocal carries the wry, slightly knowing tone of the lyric, and Crowe’s banjo break is one of the more frequently transcribed solos from the period.
The song crossed into the broader bluegrass repertoire through the 1960s, including a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band reading on Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) that brought it to the country-rock audience. The Tony Rice Unit cut it on Manzanita in 1979 with Rice’s harmonically open guitar work and a more open tempo than Martin’s brisk Sunny Mountain Boys reading. The Bluegrass Album Band, the Earls of Leicester, and dozens of festival bands have covered it since.
