“The Storms Are on the Ocean” was recorded by the Carter Family on 1 August 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, on the day of their first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company under the producer Ralph Peer. The Bristol Sessions, held between 25 July and 5 August 1927, are considered by some the “Big Bang” of modern country music. Victor issued the song coupled with “Single Girl, Married Girl” (Victor 20937), and Wikipedia’s history of the group says that record became very popular.
The song is credited to the Carters, and A.P. Carter is known to have travelled through southwestern Virginia collecting songs to record and copyright. Its verses in which a lover is asked who will shoe the sweetheart’s feet and glove her hand belong to a motif found in versions of the Child ballad “The Lass of Roch Royal” (Child 76), and SecondHandSongs lists “The Storms Are on the Ocean” as derived from that ballad.
The words are a leave-taking. A man tells his sweetheart he is going away for a while, even if it means ten thousand miles, and swears that he will return and that he would prove false only if the heavens ceased to be and the world lost its motion. She asks who will look after her while he is gone; her parents will, he answers, until he returns. The song goes on to the sight of mourning doves flying from pine to pine, and ends with a stubborn vow about when he will go back to her.
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded it with Maybelle Carter for Songs of the Famous Carter Family (Columbia, 1961), and Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson sang it on their 1963 Folk City album. Hylo Brown recorded it for his 1967 album of folk songs of rural America, and Roland White on I Wasn’t Born to Rock ’n’ Roll (1976). June Carter Cash included it on Wildwood Flower (2003), Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs recorded it with Alison Krauss on The Three Pickers, and Ashley Monroe sang it on Orthophonic Joy: The 1927 Bristol Sessions Revisited (2015).
