The Bluegrass Band
You Can Feel it in Your Soul
“You Can Feel It in Your Soul” is associated with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys’ 1955 Mercury or early-Columbia recording, the version associated with this entry. The recording belongs to the band’s mid-1950s transitional period, when F&S were moving from Mercury to Columbia and the Foggy Mountain Boys’ working sound was settling into its mature form.
The song was written by Gladys Stacey, who contributed several pieces to Flatt and Scruggs’s gospel and country catalogue during their Mercury Records period. The song’s authorship is generally given to Lester Flatt, in keeping with much of the band’s writer-credited material from the period. The lyric is a gospel-leaning conviction piece: the narrator declares that you can feel salvation in your soul, that the truth of the gospel is interior and unmistakable when it lands, and the chorus works the title phrase as a recurring affirmation.
The harmonic shape is straightforwardly traditional in G or A, the tempo sits in the moderate-up range, and the song works as a brisk gospel-leaning vocal feature with a strong chorus harmony slot. Flatt’s flat-baritone lead, Curly Seckler’s tenor harmony, and Scruggs’s three-finger banjo break together give the recording its definitive Foggy Mountain Boys texture. It pairs naturally with other F&S gospel-leaning pieces in any traditional bluegrass gospel set.
