“You Don’t Know My Mind” is a Jimmie Skinner song, and Skinner made the first record of it. Born in 1909 at Blue Lick, near Berea, Kentucky, and raised from his teens in Hamilton, Ohio, he was based in Cincinnati when Lou Epstein, formerly a sales manager for King Records, signed him in 1949 to his own Radio Artists label. Skinner cut the song around April 1950 at E. T. Herzog’s studio at 811 Race Street, Cincinnati, singing and playing rhythm guitar, with “Lucky” Moore on lead guitar and Curly Lunsford on electric mandolin. Radio Artists issued it in May 1950 on No. 256, backed with “Lula Lee.” The master was later leased to Mercury and put on the Skinner album Songs That Made the Jukebox Play, and he recorded the song again in 1976 for Vetco, with Josh Graves on dobro and Katie Laur singing harmony.
The singer is a drifter. He has been “a hobo and a tramp,” has heard “the music of the rail” and slept in “every dirty old jail,” and he tells the woman who says he is sweet and kind that she does not know his mind; the last verse warns that she will find she was wrong when her “lovin’ little daddy is gone.”
Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys recorded it in Nashville in the small hours of 14 January 1960, at the Bradley Film and Recording Studio with Owen Bradley producing. Martin sang lead and played guitar, with Paul Williams on mandolin, J. D. Crowe on banjo, Benny Martin on fiddle, Junior Huskey on bass and Buddy Harman on drums. Decca put it on the LP Good ’n’ Country (DL 4016) in May 1960 and on a single, Decca 31157, with “Bear Tracks,” in October; MCA reissued it as a single with “Sunny Side of the Mountain” in 1973, and Rounder took the song’s title for its 1984 Martin collection You Don’t Know My Mind, 1956–1966. Martin sang it again for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken (United Artists, 1972), with Vassar Clements on fiddle and Huskey on bass, and re-recorded it for Gusto in 1978 as “Honey, You Don’t Know My Mind.” He also recorded Skinner’s “Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler” for his 1962 album Country Music Time.
Tony Rice sang it on California Autumn (Rebel, 1975), with John Starling and Ricky Skaggs on harmony, and sang it again with J. D. Crowe and the New South at Kubo Hall in Japan, where Skaggs sang tenor and Crowe baritone, for Holiday in Japan (Towa, 1976). The Canadian band the Dixie Flyers included it on Light, Medium, Heavy (Boot, 1977), and the Seldom Scene performed it at their fifteenth-anniversary concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington on 10 November 1986, with Rice as a guest, released by Sugar Hill in 1988.
