19

You Are My Sunshine

music and words by Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell

(disputed authorship)

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine;

You make me happy when skies are grey.

You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

FOUR SIMPLE LINES OF MUSIC with words of almost equal simplicity, ‘You Are My Sunshine’ is one of the Western world’s best-known songs. It has been performed and recorded by everyone from bluegrass musicians to soul and gospel singers, from children’s entertainers to jazz singers, from the singing cowboy Gene Autry to Bryan Ferry. Does the song’s appeal lie in its simplicity, its three chords and a chorus that is musically identical to the verse? Or is it the song’s ambiguity? For while the chorus is often sung alone as a cheery, up-tempo number, the lyrics in the verses indicate a darker story: by the end of the song the sunshine has been extinguished.

The song is commonly credited to Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell. Davis was born in 1899 and lived through the whole of the twentieth century, dying on 5 November 2000. He was not just a popular hillbilly singer, but also the governor of the state of Louisiana between 1944 and 1948 and again between 1960 and 1964. A larger-than-life good old boy, and a segregationist to his core, he would often perform the song at his campaign rallies, in the company of a horse named Sunshine.

But despite a close association with Jimmie Davis, the song’s authorship is far from clear. The only thing that seems certain is that Davis was not the one who wrote it. Before his first recording of the song with Mitchell in 1940 it had already been recorded at least twice in 1939, by the Pine Ridge Brothers and the Rice Brothers Gang. On the blue ‘Decca’ label of the latter, the song is attributed to Paul Rice, who is believed to have sold the rights to Davis, a common practice at the time. But there are also claims that the man behind the music was not in fact Rice, but a former collaborator of his, Oliver Hood, who’d performed the song live at a war veterans’ convention in Georgia in 1933.

Perhaps we’ll never know for sure, and in a way, the song’s authorship is moot. Like ‘Happy Birthday to You’, another popular number with disputed authorship, ‘You Are My Sunshine’ belongs to everyone. What continues to remain interesting is the nature of the song. What is it really about?

Mose Allison, who performed the song most of his long career and liked to introduce it by saying, ‘This next song was written by the former governor of Louisiana’, sang it as a slow blues. He just did the chorus and the first verse, but by the end of that verse the song has already taken a dark turn. While there’s none of the original tune in Allison’s interpretation, the bluesy quality of his voice fits the words.

The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping,

I dreamt I held you by my side.

When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken,

So I hung my head and cried.

The more common second line of this first verse is ‘held you in my arms’, but Allison always sang ‘by my side’, which at least rhymes with ‘cried’. The song was invariably a highlight of his set, and the fact that it could be performed so convincingly as a blues is testament to the song’s flexibility. But then that was there from the start.

The early recorded versions are all in different styles, ranging from the gentle hillbilly treatment by the Pine Ridge Brothers, to the Rice Brothers Gang’s more animated foxtrot with pedal-steel solos, to Jimmie Davis and the Charles Mitchell Orchestra’s Dixieland jazz version featuring a clarinet and muted trumpet. Along with Mitchell’s guitar version, those early recordings were almost immediately followed by numerous others, including Autry’s in 1941, and the same year one by Bing Crosby. Both were hits, and both sounded cheery enough, even though Autry and Crosby sang all the verses and the story only gets darker.

I’ll always love you and make you happy

If you will only say the same

But if you leave me to love another

You’ll regret it all some day.

You told me once, dear, you really loved me,

And no one else, dear, could come between.

But now you’ve left me and love another

You have shattered all my dreams.

It’s a major key song, employing the three most basic chords in the toolbox. In C major these are C (and C7 if you must), F and G7. The melody is equally simple, its four lines, with a few variants, really adding up to ABBA. It’s common to throw a D sharp/E flat into the melody on the first syllable of ‘only’, but sheet music generally represents the note as a diatonic D natural. Perhaps it’s the music’s simplicity that makes it so flexible.

In 1962, Ray Charles included it on volume two of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and as in Mose Allison’s blues version, retained precisely none of the original tune. Aretha Franklin’s account of the song on The Delta Meets Detroit (1998) is effectively a tribute to Charles.

In 1974, Bryan Ferry, taking time off from Roxy Music to make a second solo album, Another Time, Another Place, included a version of ‘You Are My Sunshine’. His account employs only two verses but about a dozen repetitions of the chorus and manages to last nearly seven minutes, adding New Orleans brass and gospel singers along the way.

Perhaps the most touching recording of the song is that made by the ageing Johnny Cash for producer Rick Rubin, issued after Cash’s death in 2003 on the boxed set Unearthed. Like everything else on those recordings, the performance is pared right back. It’s a distillation of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ to the very essence, Cash even conflating the second and third verses. But through his shaky wreck of a voice, the tune remains intact, and perhaps for the first time, the tune makes sense of the words. It’s still major key, still simple – in fact never simpler – and it’s definitely not a blues, but it is heartbreaking.