“On My Mind” is a bluegrass heartbreak song credited to the songwriters Tom James and Marijohn Wilkin. Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it in the mid-1950s and released it on a single in 1956.
The lyric is a study in inescapable memory — a lost love who stays on the singer’s mind no matter what he does or where he goes. That theme of a heartbreak that will not fade was a country and bluegrass staple, and the Foggy Mountain Boys gave it their clean, bright treatment.
The song appeared on the flip side of “Randy Lynn Rag,” the banjo instrumental Earl Scruggs named for his newborn son, and it has remained part of the deep Flatt and Scruggs catalog that later bluegrass musicians have drawn on.
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