“The Last Thing on My Mind” is a song written by Tom Paxton, one of the central figures of the early-1960s Greenwich Village folk revival. Paxton wrote it early in that decade and recorded it on his 1964 album “Ramblin’ Boy.”
The song is a tender, regretful farewell — a singer realizing too late that he has let a love slip away through carelessness, when losing her was the last thing on his mind. Its melody owes a debt to the traditional sailor’s song “The Leaving of Liverpool,” and that folk grounding gave the new song an immediate, time-worn feel.
“The Last Thing on My Mind” was embraced almost at once and has since been recorded by well over a hundred artists; a 1967 duet by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton became its best-known country version.
