“Jimmie Brown the Newsboy” (originally “Jimmie Brown, the Paper Boy”) was written in 1875 by William S. Hays, the Louisville-born songwriter responsible for a long list of mid-19th-century parlour and minstrel hits. The song circulated widely in print through the late 19th century and survived in oral tradition into the early-recording era.
The Carter Family recorded the most consequential version on November 25, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, though it wasn’t released until June 19, 1931. A.P. Carter, in keeping with his usual practice, dropped Hays’s last two verses, rewrote some of the lyrics, set the song to a different melody than the printed Hays original, and credited himself as composer. The song is now widely thought of as “a Carter Family piece” with Hays’s role largely forgotten outside dedicated discographic circles.
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s 1951 reading is the source for the bluegrass canonical version. The Foggy Mountain Boys’ arrangement — up-tempo, Scruggs’s three-finger banjo break, Flatt’s flat-baritone lead — reset the song as a working bluegrass standard. The lyric narrates a young newsboy’s daily round and his quiet dignity in poverty, in the sentimental Victorian mould Hays favoured. It remains a regular jam call in any traditional set.
