“Keep on the Sunny Side” was written in 1899 by Ada Blenkhorn, with music by J. Howard Entwisle. Blenkhorn drew the song’s central image from a phrase used by her disabled nephew, who liked to be wheeled in his chair down “the sunny side” of the street. What began as a personal hymn of cheerful resolve passed into the broader Christian-hymn repertoire over the following decades.
The song’s place in American country and bluegrass music traces to 1928, when the Carter Family recorded it in Camden, New Jersey. The Carters had learned the song from A. P. Carter’s uncle, a music teacher, and the recorded version transformed it from a Christian hymn into a country-music staple. “Keep on the Sunny Side” became the Carter Family’s theme song on radio in subsequent years and is one of the most strongly identified pieces in the entire Carter Family catalog.
The song crossed into the bluegrass canon through the Carter family lineage and through Country Music Hall of Fame veneration of the Carter recordings. It received a contemporary surge through the O Brother, Where Art Thou?-era revival of Carter material; the Whites, Norman and Nancy Blake, and many others have cut it. It remains one of the most reliable optimistic-set call-outs in any bluegrass jam.
