“Sweetheart You Done Me Wrong” was recorded by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys on 27 October 1947 in Chicago, at the CBS studio of radio station WBBM in the Wrigley Building, at a Columbia session produced by Art Satherley. It is credited to Monroe, in some listings together with Lester Flatt. Flatt sang lead and played guitar, Monroe sang tenor and played mandolin, and the band was completed by Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle and Howard Watts, known as Cedric Rainwater, on bass. Columbia released it on 12 April 1948 as the B side of “My Rose of Old Kentucky” (Columbia 20423, also issued as 38172).
The singer’s sweetheart told him her love was true, and he thought the world of her; now she has gone and left him with no one to call his own. He recalls the day she told him she was leaving and how he could not believe it, and though the road ahead is rough and rocky without her, he keeps praying for the time when she will change her mind.
Monroe recorded it again on 14 March 1972 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, with his son James Monroe, for their MCA album Father and Son. Earl Taylor and his Bluegrass Mountaineers put it on their Capitol LP Blue Grass Taylor Made (1964), and Red Allen, Frank Wakefield and the Kentuckians, with Bill Keith on banjo, recorded it in New York for the Folkways LP Bluegrass the same year. Flatt returned to it with Mac Wiseman on Lester ’n’ Mac (RCA Victor, 1971). Peter Rowan included it on The First Whippoorwill (Sugar Hill, 1985), and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver on The News Is Out (Sugar Hill, 1987).
