The Carter Family — Sara Carter, A. P. Carter and Maybelle Carter — recorded “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” for Victor on 14 February 1929, at the company’s studio in Trinity Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey. Victor issued it in June 1929 (V-40089), coupled with “Engine One-Forty-Three.” The song is credited to A. P. Carter, who collected traditional songs and reworked them for the group. Victor’s Bluebird label reissued it in 1933, and the Carters recorded the song again for the American Record Corporation in New York on 10 May 1935.
Sara Carter sings the lead. The singer is a woman thinking of her “blue eyes,” a man “sailing far over the sea,” and wondering whether he ever thinks of her. It would have been better, she says, had they never met in “this wide and wicked world”; he told her once that he loved her and that they would never part, but “a link in the chain has been broken.” In the last verse she asks whether, when the cold grave encloses her, he will come and shed a tear and tell the strangers around him that a poor heart he has broken lies there.
The melody turns up in several other songs. Welby Toomey and Edgar Boaz had used it in “Thrills That I Can’t Forget” in 1925. Roy Acuff sang it in “The Great Speckled Bird,” credited to the Rev. Guy Smith, which Acuff recorded in Chicago on 20 October 1936. Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” written by William Warren and Arlie Carter and recorded in Hollywood on 11 December 1951, used the same tune and topped the Billboard country chart in 1952; Kitty Wells answered it, on the same melody, with Jay Miller’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” recorded in Nashville on 3 May 1952, which also reached No. 1.
Jimmy Martin recorded the Carter song in Nashville on 17 September 1963 for his Decca album Sing Widow Maker (1964), and Doc Watson cut it for Good Deal! Doc Watson in Nashville (Vanguard, 1968). Maybelle Carter sang it again on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken (United Artists, 1972), with Earl Scruggs on banjo, Vassar Clements on fiddle and Merle Travis on guitar, and Ralph Stanley included it on his 2006 album of Carter Family songs, A Distant Land to Roam.
