“You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way” is credited to Jimmie Davis and Lloyd Ellis and published by Peer Music. In Ralph Rinzler’s account, when Bill Monroe and Doc Watson first rehearsed together for their appearances at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles in 1963, Monroe suggested songs he had never performed or recorded with anyone else, and this was one of them. Rinzler wrote that it fell into place within minutes. Their Ash Grove performance, which the notes date to 14 April 1963, stayed unreleased for thirty years. It came out in 1993 on Smithsonian Folkways’ Live Duet Recordings 1963–1980: Off the Record Volume 2, with Monroe on mandolin, Watson on guitar and both men singing.
Monroe recorded it with the Blue Grass Boys ten years later, on 17 June 1973, at his seventh annual festival at Bean Blossom, Indiana. He sang lead, with Bob Fowler on guitar, Jack Hicks on banjo, Kenny Baker on fiddle and Guy Stevenson on bass, and MCA released the performance that November on the two-LP set Bean Blossom.
The lyric is short and direct. The singer tells his sweetheart he will go whenever she asks. He has tried night and day to show her how much he loves her, and he warns that once he is gone for good she will find she is not satisfied after all.
Other bands took it up as well. The Kentucky Colonels, with Clarence White on guitar and Roland White on mandolin, played it in a performance from 1965–67 that Rounder issued in 1976 on Kentucky Colonels, 1965–1967. Doug Green recorded it for Liza Jane & Sally Anne (Old Homestead, 1972) with Buck White on mandolin, Sharon and Cheryl White on guitar and bass and Vic Jordan on banjo. Clarence, Roland and Eric White, billed as the New Kentucky Colonels with Alan Munde on banjo, played it at the Mosebacke club in Stockholm on 28 May 1973, a set Rounder released in 1976. Dave Evans and River Bend opened Goin’ Round This World (Rebel, 1981) with it.
