“Somebody Touched Me” is a gospel song generally credited to John Reedy, who recorded it in the late 1940s with his group the Stone Mountain Hillbillies. It grew out of the older spiritual “Do, Lord, Remember Me,” borrowing that song’s repeated-phrase structure and its central idea of being singled out by grace. Like many gospel numbers that passed into bluegrass, its exact authorship is hard to pin down, since the material circulated widely in church and community singing before anyone copyrighted it.
The lyric describes conversion as a literal touch — “while I was praying, somebody touched me” — and answers the question of who with the plain refrain that it must have been the hand of the Lord. The verses move through praying, singing, and shouting, each marked by the same sudden contact and the joy that follows.
The song became a fixture of bluegrass gospel largely through the Stanley Brothers, whose tight quartet arrangement set the pattern later groups followed.
