“Stormy Waters” is a bluegrass gospel song written by Jimmy Martin and Paul Williams. Williams sang and played mandolin in Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys, and the pair wrote a number of songs together. Martin first released it with the band in 1970.
The lyric uses storm-tossed water as a figure for the trials of life. The singer admits to being battered by trouble but holds to the promise that God’s unchanging hand will see him through, and the chorus returns again and again to that image of rough water and steady faith.
The song became part of the body of gospel material that Martin’s band carried, and later groups took it up as well.