“Sweet Little Miss Blue Eyes” was written by Don Helms, steel guitarist with Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys, with a co-writer credited on the original Epic releases as B. Taylor. Cedarwood published it. Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys recorded it on 22 June 1962 at Columbia’s studio in Nashville, with Jesse McReynolds singing lead and playing mandolin and Jim McReynolds singing tenor and playing guitar. Allen Shelton played banjo, Jimmy Buchanan fiddle, Don McHan second guitar and David Sutherland bass, with Douglas Kirkham on drums. Epic released it as a single (5-9528) in July 1962, with “Pickin’ and a-Grinnin’” on the other side, and in February 1963 it became the first track on the brothers’ LP Bluegrass Special.
The lyric is a cheerful love song. The singer’s new girl has made him forget every other girl he has met and treats him better than he feels he deserves. He plans to show her off around the neighborhood until every other girl in town is jealous, says he means to stay true, and counts himself lucky that she is his.
The brothers kept singing it on stage. Their performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963 appears on Vanguard’s Newport Folk Festival: Best of Bluegrass 1959–66 (2001). They also performed it at Bill Monroe’s seventh annual Bean Blossom festival in Indiana in 1973, and MCA released that performance on the two-LP set Bean Blossom in November that year. In January 1982 the group Here Today recorded it in Hollywood for their Rounder album Here Today, with Herb Pedersen singing lead, Vince Gill tenor and David Grisman baritone. Larry Stephenson recorded it for Timber (Webco, 1990) and again on 30 (2019). Later recordings include Chris Thile and Michael Daves’s Sleep With One Eye Open (2011), the Gibson Brothers’ Brotherhood (2015) and the Railsplitters’ The Faster It Goes (2015).
