“You Can Feel It in Your Soul” carries a writer’s credit to Gladys Stacey, the maiden name of Lester Flatt’s wife, Gladys. For a time Flatt and Earl Scruggs put their wives’ maiden names, Gladys Stacey and Louise Certain, on some of their songs for copyright purposes. Gladys Lee Stacy, born in White County, Tennessee, in 1915, married Flatt when she was sixteen.
Flatt and Scruggs recorded the song for Columbia on the morning of 23 January 1955 at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville, at a session that also produced “Old Fashioned Preacher,” another Stacey credit. Flatt sang lead, with Curly Seckler on tenor, Scruggs on baritone and Paul Warren on bass voice. The accompaniment was guitars and bass only: Flatt, Scruggs and Eddie Hill on guitar and Jake Tullock on bass. Columbia issued the two songs back to back as 21370 on 21 February 1955.
The lyric is a plain-spoken word to churchgoers. A person who goes to church on Sunday but leaves the Savior out will feel alone when the others start to shout; one who has the old-time religion wants the whole world to know. Rather than asking neighbours about sin, or what it takes to have Christ within, the listener is told to open the Bible and read it through, and the refrain answers each verse: there is no need to ask anybody, because you can feel it in your soul.
The duo cut it again in Nashville on 29 October 1959 for their gospel album Songs of Glory (Columbia CS 8221, March 1960), and Harmony reissued the original single side on Sacred Songs in 1967. Flatt recorded it again with his own band, the Nashville Grass, Curly Seckler once more singing tenor, on Flatt Gospel (Canaan, 1975), and County Records took the song’s title for a 1988 Flatt and Scruggs collection. Alan Bibey & Grasstowne recorded it for 4 (Mountain Fever, 2015), and the Earls of Leicester played it on Live at the CMA Theater in the Country Music Hall of Fame (Rounder, 2018).
