“Mind Your Own Business” was written by Hank Williams and recorded for MGM at Castle Studio in Nashville in an overnight session on 1–2 March 1949, with Fred Rose producing. The musicians listed for the session are Dale Potter on fiddle, Don Davis on steel guitar, Zeb Turner on electric guitar and Jack Shook on rhythm guitar, with Ernie Newton probably on bass. MGM released it in July 1949 as the A side of a single with “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight,” and it reached the country top ten.
In the song the singer answers the people who interfere in his life. He says that quarrels between him and his wife are their own right, complains of the nosy woman on the party line who picks up her receiver whenever his ring comes, and tells a critic that if he wants to honky-tonk until two or three in the morning it is his own headache. The refrain advises the busybody to mind his own business, since that will keep him busy enough. Accounts of the song link it to Williams’s tempestuous marriage to Audrey Williams; when he introduced it on the radio in October 1949 he called it a “little prophecy in song.”
The song has been recorded many times since. Jimmy Dean took it to No. 35 on the country chart in 1964, Ernest Tubb included it on a 1968 album of Williams songs, and Steve Goodman recorded it in 1971. In 1986 Hank Williams Jr. recorded it with Reba McEntire, Tom Petty, Reverend Ike and Willie Nelson, and that version went to No. 1 on the country chart for two weeks.
