Oliver Hood was a music teacher at the blind school in Georgia, and there he met up with George Rice a blind boy who went there. In 1933 Hood wrote a song and knew that the tune was older than that. There have been other songs that have words to the same tune but no one knows them now. In that year boys and girls sung this in class lessons often with Hood's piano but the more well known words we know appeared in 1939 and the song was first sung by a group calld The Pineridge Boys. The song got new words written by Jimmy Davis and Charles Mitchell. These words were the song we know now as You Are My Sunshine. Davis was riding on a horse named Sunshine with that this song has been covered so many times. In 1987 the comedy O Brother Where Art Thou used this song on the show that my father would watch. In 1999 I sang and played it later with my former girlfriend Lissa. In Covid times there have been words such as You are The Vaccine to help raise fundsin Britain. If anyone knows who the writer of the 1897 version is could they post it here? The song we know today seems to derive from the 1939 version. The schools all over England and Sccoland have sung this song after the news of a teacher who taught in a school in Georgia in 1933 but folk do not know that the tune from 1887 was older than the 2 other versions. It is special to me as I was at the Royal Blind school myself in the 1908s and we sung it there.