By:Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs · Source Recording: Flatt & Scruggs (1948*)Song details
The time has come to say goodbye
I'm asking you to please don't cry
The time to me won't be so long
To know you're happy back at home
Someday we'll meet again sweetheart
We'll meet and never more to part
Someday we'll meet again sweetheart
Don't cry so please don't break my heart
So goodbye now don't be blue
Try to be happy and be true
And remember what I say
Sweetheart we'll meet again someday
Oh sweetheart I'm leaving now
Yes I'll soon be on my way
Each night upon my knees I pray
Sweetheart we'll meet again someday
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By:Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs · Source Recording:Flatt & Scruggs (1948*)
“We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart” is credited to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and published through Peer. They recorded it at one of their first sessions as the Foggy Mountain Boys, held around November 1948 at the studio of radio station WROL on Gay Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, with Murray Nash producing for Mercury. Flatt sang lead and played guitar, Mac Wiseman sang tenor and played guitar, Scruggs played banjo, Jim Shumate fiddle and Howard Watts bass. Mercury issued it in April 1949 on 78 (6181), backed with “My Cabin in Caroline” from the same session.
The song is a farewell. A man about to leave asks his sweetheart not to cry, tells her the time apart will not be long, and asks her to stay happy and true while he is gone. The chorus turns that into a promise that they will meet again and not part a second time, and the last verse has him praying on his knees each night for that day.
Mercury put the 1948 side on LP in 1958, on Country Music (MG 20358), and it also turned up on Starday collections in the 1960s. Other bands took it up early: a group led by the banjo player Sonny Osborne recorded it in Cincinnati in December 1952, with Enos Johnson singing, for the Kentucky label (606). Flatt returned to it on 15 March 1971, cutting it with Mac Wiseman at RCA Victor’s Nashville studio for the B-side of the single 74-0576.
Later recordings came from Doc Watson, on the 1986 Sugar Hill album Riding the Midnight Train, with Sam Bush, Mark O’Connor and Béla Fleck in the band; from Jim & Jesse, whose 1991 Rounder album Music Among Friends has Curly Seckler singing it, recorded in 1990; and from Bill Emerson, who opened his Webco album Reunion with it, recorded in 1991 with Tony Rice singing lead.
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Clicks before the band comes in, so you start together.
Raises the tempo as the band goes round, so you build up speed.
The band goes quiet for a bar or two and you keep the time going.
Clicks before the band comes in, so you start together.
Raises the tempo as the band goes round, so you build up speed.
The band goes quiet for a bar or two and you keep the time going.
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