“No Hard Times” is a song written and recorded by Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman” and a founding figure of country music. Rodgers cut it in 1932, near the end of his short life and at the depth of the Great Depression.
The song is a Depression piece — but a defiant, good-humored one. Rather than cataloging misery, its narrator shrugs off the hard times, insisting that with love and a little determination there need be no hard times at all. That stubborn optimism, set to Rodgers’s easy blue-yodel style, gave the song its lift.
The song was kept alive by later traditional musicians.
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