“Somebody Touched Me” is a gospel song credited to John Reedy, who with his wife Frances worked in Harlan County, Kentucky, appearing on the Harlan radio station WHLN in the late 1930s and much of the 1940s. The couple moved to Dayton, Ohio, in the early 1950s for factory work and recorded there for small labels including Ark, Jalyn, Jewel and Starday. Berea College’s archive of their papers names “Somebody Touched Me” as the most famous song John wrote.
Reedy first recorded it in the late 1940s with his group, billed as the Stone Mountain Boys (also given as the Stone Mountain Hillbillies), a lineup of John and Frances Reedy with Glenn Ramey on mandolin and Julian Ramey on banjo. It came out in 1949 on the small Twin-City label (1021), coupled with “Driftwood.” In June 1961 he recorded it again, probably in Dayton, as the John Reedy Trio, for Starday (SEP-179).
The lyric is built on a single refrain, repeated after every verse: the singer was touched, and the one who touched him must have been the Lord. Each verse changes only the moment of the touch — while singing, while shouting “glory,” while praying, while preaching — so the song reads as a list of the places where the singer felt grace arrive.
The Stanley Brothers recorded it on 8 February 1961 at the King studio in Cincinnati, with Carter Stanley and Ralph Stanley, Curley Lambert on mandolin, Vernon Derrick on fiddle and Chick Stripling on bass; it was issued on their King LP Old Time Camp Meeting. They also sang it on radio broadcasts, a tape of which later appeared on the Wango label’s John’s Gospel Quartet LP. A live Jimmy Martin album covering 1958–1960 also includes it.
