“I’ll Remember You, Love, in My Prayers” is a sentimental parlor song written in 1869 by Will S. Hays, a prolific songwriter from Louisville, Kentucky, whose nineteenth-century songs circulated widely in the songbooks of the era.
The song became a parlor and front-porch favorite and passed deep into oral tradition, turning up in songsters across Kentucky, Virginia, and beyond. Its gentle lyric — a promise to keep an absent love in one’s prayers, set against the image of the “curtains of night” pinned back by the stars — gave it lasting tenderness, and over time it crossed into country, Irish, and bluegrass tradition alike.
The song reached records in the early twentieth century and was later recorded by country and bluegrass artists including Hank Snow and Mac Wiseman.
