“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. The version heard here is by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, the pioneering duo, drawn from recordings they made in the Washington, D.C., area in the 1960s and later issued on an archival collection.
