“I Still Miss Someone” was written by Johnny Cash with his nephew Roy Cash Jr. Cash recorded it in Nashville on 13 August 1958, at the Bradley Film and Recording Studio, with Don Law producing and Luther Perkins, Don Helms, Marshall Grant, Morris Palmer and Marvin Hughes behind him. Columbia put it out as the B-side of “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” and included it on his LP The Fabulous Johnny Cash.
The lyric is a short list of small scenes. Autumn leaves fall at the door and a cold wind is coming; sweethearts walk past. The singer goes to a party looking for a little fun and ends up in a dark corner. Memories of a lost lover’s blue eyes and arms follow, along with the thought that someone else must be out there somewhere, and every verse comes back to the same admission that the singer is still missing the one who left.
Cash kept the song in his shows. He sang it at Folsom Prison, and most of his later live recordings include it. In 1966 he performed it backstage with Bob Dylan on Dylan’s world tour, which was filmed for Eat the Document, and in February 1969 the two recorded it as a duet during the sessions for Dylan’s Nashville Skyline; that take was not released until 2019, on The Bootleg Series Vol. 15: Travelin’ Thru, 1967–1969.
Bluegrass musicians took it up in the 1960s. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded it at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 15 December 1964, with Flatt singing lead, Buck Graves on tenor and Scruggs on baritone, and Charlie McCoy adding harmonica. Columbia issued it as a single on 11 January 1965, backed with “Father’s Table Grace,” and it reached number 45 on the Billboard country chart. On 27 January 1983, at Burns Station Sound in Burns, Tennessee, Cash himself sang lead with Bill Monroe on tenor for the album Bill Monroe and Friends (MCA, 1984). Dolly Parton cut it for The Grass Is Blue (Sugar Hill, 1999) with Alison Krauss and Dan Tyminski singing harmony. Outside bluegrass, it was recorded by Emmylou Harris, whose version reached number 51 in 1989, and by Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks.
