Lester Flatt wrote “I’m Gonna Sleep with One Eye Open,” and Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it on the morning of 23 January 1955 at Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel. It was the last of four songs cut that day, after “You Can Feel It in Your Soul,” “Old Fashioned Preacher” and “Before I Met You.” Flatt sang lead and played guitar, Curly Seckler sang tenor and played mandolin, and Scruggs sang baritone and played banjo. Eddie Hill played second guitar, Paul Warren fiddle and Jake Tullock bass. Columbia released it on 20 June 1955 as the B-side of “Before I Met You,” on Columbia 21412 (78 rpm) and 4-21412 (45).
The singer has just found out “the little game you play.” His wife has been “stepping, so they say, between midnight and day,” at a honky-tonk about a mile down the road. He announces that from now on he will sleep with one eye open, and that her game is finished: “from now on, baby, you’re gonna toe the line.” The last verse turns the warning around. She has “started a little game that two can play.”
An often-repeated story holds that the song was thought too suggestive for its time. Folk Alley repeated it in 2018 when it premiered an Earls of Leicester performance: the song, it said, was considered improperly suggestive for the Grand Ole Opry audience and was censored by radio stations for the same reason.
Flatt later recut the song with his band the Nashville Grass at Nugget Studios in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, for The One and Only (Nugget, 1970), with Vic Jordan on banjo, Roland White on mandolin, Paul Warren on fiddle, Josh Graves on dobro and Jake Tullock on bass. The 1955 original was reissued on the CBS/Sony LP Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, Vol. 2 in 1976 and on The Golden Era in 1977.
Other musicians took it up from the late 1970s. The Woodstock Mountains Revue included it on More Music from Mud Acres (Rounder, 1977), Larry Sparks on It’s Never Too Late (June Appal, 1980) and Hot Rize on In Concert (Flying Fish, 1984). Dolly Parton recorded it for The Grass Is Blue (Sugar Hill, 1999), with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan and Barry Bales on harmony. Chris Thile and Michael Daves recorded it as a mandolin-and-guitar duo at Third Man Studios in Nashville in January 2011 and made it the title track of their Nonesuch album Sleep with One Eye Open. The Earls of Leicester, with Jerry Douglas on dobro, played it on Live at the CMA Theater in the Country Music Hall of Fame (Rounder, 2018).
