“I Ain’t Going to Work Tomorrow” is credited to A.P. Carter and was first recorded by the Carter Family in 1928, in the New Jersey/New York studio sessions that produced the bulk of the original Carter Family catalogue. As with much of A.P.’s songbook, the credit is best read as collector-arranger as much as composer — the song almost certainly draws on older traditional verses A.P. heard during his collecting trips through the Virginia and Tennessee mountains.
The recording most contemporary bluegrass pickers reference is Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s 1961 reading with the Foggy Mountain Boys. Flatt’s flat-baritone lead, Scruggs’s three-finger banjo, and the brisk Foggy Mountain tempo together turn the older Carter Family piece into an up-tempo bluegrass standard. The Country Gentlemen revisited it in 1962 with a tighter, more harmonically arranged reading.
The lyric is a mock-defiant work song: a young man insists he is going to dance, see his sweetheart, and not be at the mill in the morning. The harmonic shape is straightforwardly traditional and three-chord, and the song slotted easily into the bluegrass repertoire from the early 1960s onward. It remains one of the more frequently called Carter Family pieces at jams, with a memorable refrain and enough harmonic room for a confident lead to play with the phrasing.
