“Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone” was credited to A.P. Carter and recorded by the Carter Family in 1928 for Victor; the song was registered for copyright the following year. As with most of A.P.’s catalogue, the credit is best read as collector-arranger as much as composer; the song’s origins lie in older Southern revival-and-gospel hymnody that A.P. would have heard on his collecting trips through Virginia and Tennessee.
The lyric is a death-and-remembrance text in the older Southern gospel tradition: the singer asks his loved ones whether they will miss him when he is gone — whether the small daily affections will be remembered, whether his absence will register in their lives as a real loss. The Carter Family’s 1928 recording established the song’s place in the canon; subsequent versions by the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, and dozens of others have kept it in active circulation.
A notable recording is Ralph Stanley’s 1971 reading. Stanley’s deep gospel catalogue from the post-Carter-Stanley period (Carter died in 1966) drew widely on traditional and Southern-gospel material; this recording is one of his more frequently cited solo gospel readings. The harmonic shape is straightforwardly traditional in G or A, the tempo sits in the slow-to-moderate range, and the song works as a vocal feature with a strong four-part harmony slot on the chorus refrain.
