“You Are My Sunshine” was copyrighted on 30 January 1940 in the names of Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell and published by Southern Music of New York, but neither man is known to have written it. Davis, the Louisiana singer who later served two terms as the state’s governor, from 1944 to 1948 and from 1960 to 1964, and Mitchell, his steel guitarist, bought the rights in late 1939 from Paul Rice of the Rice Brothers’ Gang for $35. Rice said he had written it in 1937. Other claimants followed: in a 1990 article in Chronicles, Theodore Pappas, a grandson of the LaGrange, Georgia, mandolinist and music teacher Oliver Hood, set out the family’s account that Hood wrote the song and first sang it at a VFW convention in LaGrange in 1933.
The first recording was made in Atlanta on 22 August 1939 by the Pine Ridge Boys, the duo of Marvin Taylor and Doug Spivey, for Bluebird. The Rice Brothers’ Gang, then based at KWKH in Shreveport, recorded it for Decca on 13 September 1939. Davis cut his own version for Decca in New York on 5 February 1940, six days after the copyright was registered, with Charles Mitchell’s Orchestra (Mitchell on steel guitar, Leon Chappelear on guitar), and Decca issued it as 5813 with “Old Timer” on the other side. Gene Autry and Bing Crosby each recorded it in 1941. By the time of Davis’s death in 2000, BMI counted more than 350 recorded versions, and the Louisiana legislature had made it a state song in 1977.
For all its cheerful chorus, the lyric is a lament. The singer dreams of holding the one he loves and wakes to find it untrue; the chorus begs that his “sunshine” not be taken away, and the verses tell of a lover who promised that no one could come between them and then left for someone else, with the singer offering at the end to forgive and take all the blame if only she will come back.
Jimmy Martin recorded it at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, on 10 April 1974, with his daughter Lisa Sarah Martin singing lead, and MCA put it out on a single (40338) behind “Lost to a Stranger.” Norman Blake sang it with his guitar for the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where it is the third track.
