Subject: RE: Help: Did Jimmie Davis really write SUNSHINE?
From:
Stewie
Date: 29 Jul 01 - 08:46 AM
Evidently, a Japanese country music historian, Toru Mitsui, devoted an entire monograph to this matter which he delivered at the 6th Annual Country Music Conference, Meridian, Mississippi on 26 May 1989: 'You Are My Sunshine: A Question of Authorship'.
Tony Russell gives a brief account in his booklet to the second Bear Family box set of Davis' complete recordings. It is a tangled web, but the key facts are as follows:
There were 2 recordings of the song before Davis' 1940 recording: in August 1939 (Bluebird B-8263) by the Pine Ridge Boys (Marvin Taylor and Doug Spivey), a vocal duo from Atlanta; and in September 1939 (De 5763) by the Rice Brothers Gang, a band originally from north Georgia led by guitarists Hoke and Paul Rice. Davis and Charles Mitchell bought the song from Paul Rice for $35 to help him pay his wife's hospital bills. The new Davis-Mitchell copyright was published by Southern Music on 30 January 1940, 6 days before Davis put it on record. Though Mitchell's name appears on the copyright listing, he had already sold his half share to Davis.
On the other hand, Doug Spivey told Georgia country music historian, Wayne Daniel, that he and Taylor had got it from a lady singer from South Carolina who had 'got it from some fellow there'. She said: 'Take the song. Do with it what you want to'. Spivey has a half-confirmation from Paul Rice who said he got the idea after reading a 17-page letter from a girl from South Carolina who 'was talking about I was her sunshine and I got the idea for a song and put a tune to it'.
Russell points out that, despite the clear account of how he bought it, Davis always maintained that he had written it himself, that he had been singing it for years before 1940 and that he had recorded it several times (before 1940) but not satisfactorily enough for it to be issued. Russell comments that his 'discography provides no evidence to support any of these claims.
Mitsui quoted from the 'Shreveport Times' Horace Logan's opinion that the Rice brothers got the idea for 'Sunshine' from a refrain in an old Hawaiian song, a theory that even Davis seemed to support: 'It's a kind of Hawaiian tune, something like', he told Mitsui. As Russell says the tune may well be older but, since the Pine Ridge Boys, Rice and Davis all used virtually the same tune, 'we can scarcely credit Davis (or Charles Mitchell) with allying it to the text'.
Make of all that what you will.
--Stewie.
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sj
