One song that most people only know the chorus is You Are My Sunshine. It’s officially credited to Jimmy Davis and Charles Mitchell, but Davis bought the song and rights from Paul Rice. However, Paul Rice may not have actually written the song. Folks in LaGrange, Georgia claim it was written by Oliver Hood who had performed it at the VFW there in 1933, six years before the first known recording.
So, we really don’t know who actually wrote it. And, I suspect, some of you have never heard the verses, only the chorus.
What’s been on your mind? Got something you’d like to share? It’s Tuesday Night Open Thread, and you pick the topic.
Who wants to start?
I’ll start. I had heard the verses, and knew them well enough to sing along with the recording. A word here and there was different, but that’s probably just the folk process at work.
Barbara Hale, who played Della Street in the original Perry Mason television series, was born April 18, 1922, in DeKalb, Illinois, which is also the birthplace of Cindy Crawford and barbed wire, and the site of Northern Illinois University, which you attend if you’re a white, middle-class kid from the suburbs of Chicago and you don’t want to attend college but your parents insist that you have to.
Have not listened to this yet but the one extra verse I’ve ever heard is, I think, the version by Johnny Cash.