“I’m Troubled” — often sung as “I’m Troubled, I’m Troubled” — is a traditional song of worry and hard times, with roots reaching back into nineteenth-century American song. Lines and sentiments much like its own appear in spirituals collected as early as the 1860s, and like most traditional material it has no single author.
The song reached records in 1936 through the Blue Sky Boys, the North Carolina brother duo of Bill and Earl Bolick, who learned much of their early repertoire from songs their father sang at home. Their gentle, close-harmony reading became the source for many later versions.
The song carried easily into the old-time and bluegrass repertoires, its plainspoken catalog of troubles — in love, in life, in mind — suited to high mountain harmony.
