“Sunny Side of the Mountain” is credited to Harry C. McAuliffe and Bobby Gregory and was first recorded by Hawkshaw Hawkins (released as “Hank, the Singing Ranger” on early issues) in 1946. The Ivan Tribe research suggests that “Big Slim” McAuliffe and Gregory bought the song from a Pittsburgh musician named Johnny Hill rather than writing it themselves; McAuliffe used the song as his radio theme number, anchoring its early circulation in the 1940s country-radio scene of the upper South.
The song had its first wave of country-radio popularity through Hawkshaw Hawkins’s mid-1940s reading. Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, the Stanley Brothers, and other early bluegrass acts recorded versions before the song crossed into the canonical bluegrass repertoire through Jimmy Martin, whose lead-vocal reading became the most-cited bluegrass version. The song’s premise — a singer reflecting on the sunny side of the mountain where his beloved waits — sits comfortably in the homesick-Appalachian tradition that runs through both country and bluegrass canons.
“Sunny Side of the Mountain” has been carried by virtually every Jimmy Martin-tradition act since, including The Bluegrass Cardinals, the Osborne Brothers, and many contemporary bluegrass groups. It remains a regular at jam sessions where pickers want a piece with strong vocal melody and the classic bluegrass mountain-home framing. The song’s somewhat tangled authorship history (Johnny Hill wrote it, McAuliffe and Gregory bought and copyrighted it, Big Slim adopted it as theme music) is a fairly typical example of how mid-century country-songwriting credits sometimes worked.
