Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys
The Unclouded Day
Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1980) Bluegrass Discography
“Uncloudy Day” (also “The Unclouded Day”) is a Southern gospel hymn written by the Reverend Josiah Kelley Alwood in 1879. According to Alwood’s own account, the song came to him after a night-time encounter with an unusually clear, star-filled sky over rural Ohio that suggested to him the kind of heaven the song goes on to describe. The hymn was first published in the 1885 collection The Treasury of Sacred Song.
The lyric works the central image of the “land of unclouded day” as the heavenly destination — a place where the storms and shadows of earthly life finally end. The conceit pulls on older 19th-century revival imagery while leaving the song harmonically and melodically simple enough to travel widely across performers and settings.
The recording associated with this entry is the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys’ 1966 reading. The Stanleys’ deep gospel catalogue worked the older revival-hymnody repertoire with their characteristic hard-mountain bluegrass-quartet arrangement; this recording is one of many bluegrass-canonical readings of the song. It works as a moderate-tempo gospel-quartet feature in G with a strong four-part harmony slot on the chorus refrain.
