“I Could Change My Mind” was written by Earl Taylor, the mandolinist and singer from Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia, who led the Stoney Mountain Boys from the late 1950s into the early 1980s. Bluegrass Today says Taylor recorded it with the Stoney Mountain Boys in 1965.
An earlier recording came from a different band. On 25 February 1963, Charlie Tomlinson, Billy Baker and the Shady Valley Boys recorded it at Wynwood Studios in Falls Church, Virginia, with Jack Cooke on guitar and lead vocal, Tomlinson on bass and tenor, Baker on fiddle and baritone, Smiley Hobbs on banjo and Russ Hooper on bass. Rebel issued it as the B side of “Baker’s Hornpipe” (Rebel F 239-45) in May 1963.
The Johnson Mountain Boys recorded it on 13 January 1987 at Bias Recording in Springfield, Virginia, and put it first on side one of their Rounder album Requests (1988). David McLaughlin sang lead and played mandolin, with Dudley Connell on guitar and tenor, Tom Adams on banjo, Eddie Stubbs on fiddle and Marshall Wilborn on bass. The Boxcars recorded it for their self-titled album on Mountain Home (2010), with Adam Steffey singing lead. In 2025 the California band Bay Area Special released it as their debut single.
The singer is a rambler who has never cared for weddings, champagne, silk and lace, flowers or rings, and has never been married or in love. Then someone has been kind to him, and he finds himself thinking of her all the time. For her, he says, he could always change his mind, and by the last verse his rambling days are over: she has ruined him.
