“Whose Shoulder Will You Cry On” was written by Kitty Wells and Billy Wallace and first recorded by Wells on Decca in 1955, charting that year on the country charts. Wells — already the reigning “Queen of Country Music” following the breakthrough success of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” — wrote and recorded the song in the pointed rhetorical mode she excelled at: the narrator addresses a former lover, asking with wry finality just whose shoulder he plans to lean on when the new relationship fails.
The lyric is an after-the-betrayal taunt: the narrator’s former lover will need someone to cry on after the inevitable disappointment of his new relationship, and the singer wonders whose shoulder will be on offer when that day comes. The conceit gives the song a wry bitterness rather than the more straightforward heartbreak register, and Wells’s original honky-tonk vocal arrangement made the song a regional standard that found its way to subsequent country and bluegrass performers.
A notable recording is Dan Tyminski’s 2008 reading on his Rounder album Wheels. Tyminski’s contemporary-traditional bluegrass arrangement — with Ron Block, Adam Steffey, Barry Bales, and Justin Moses across the album’s tracks — pulls the song into a bluegrass register without losing its country-duet character.
