Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys
I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes
Sing Widow Maker (1964) Bluegrass Discography
“I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” was credited to A.P. Carter and recorded by the Carter Family in 1929 for Victor, during one of the early Camden, New Jersey sessions. As with most of A.P.’s catalogue, the credit is best read as collector-arranger as much as composer; the underlying melody is older and travelled widely through the Anglo-American oral tradition.
The melody is one of the most-borrowed in American country music. Roy Acuff used it for his 1936 hit “The Great Speckled Bird,” which itself was the source for Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life” (1952), which in turn provided the answer-song framework for Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (1952). The four songs share a single tune across vastly different lyrical worlds — mountain courtship, gospel apocalypse, honky-tonk women, and feminist country protest.
The Carter Family lyric is a remembrance text: the narrator thinking tonight of his blue-eyed lover gone away, the kind of plain-spoken yearning that Sara Carter’s lead vocal sells without needing emotional underlining. The song travelled into the bluegrass repertoire through Bill Monroe’s high-tenor reading and the Stanley Brothers’ versions, and it remains a frequent jam call — especially among singers who want to thread the historical connection to the Acuff/Wells melodic family.
