“Keep on the Sunny Side” is a popular American song originally written in 1899 by Ada Blenkhorn (1858–1927) with music by J. Howard Entwisle (1866–1903). The song was popularized in a 1928 recording by the Carter Family. A recording of the song with The Whites was featured in the 2000 movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The Carter Family learned of the song from A. P. Carter’s uncle who was a music teacher, and they recorded the song in Camden, New Jersey in 1928. “Keep on the Sunny Side” became their theme song on the radio in later years. A. P. Carter’s tombstone has a gold record of the song embedded in it. In later years, the Carter Family treated “Keep on the Sunny Side” as a theme song of sorts. A 1964 album by the Carter Family (with special guest vocalist Johnny Cash) was titled Keep On the Sunny Side. (More from Wikipedia)
But that was just the beginning. One of the A. P. Carter songs on The Famous Carter Family is so timeless that it is hard to imagine anyone writing it: “Keep on the Sunny Side”. There are three bonafide classic gospel songs: “Can the Circle be Unbroken”, “Lonesome Valley”, and “Gospel Ship”. Another song was one I knew as a Woody Guthrie number, “Worried Man Blues”. The other songs I was not familiar with but quickly learned to love as much as the others. I gathered up a few more Carter Family albums and learned what I could about them.
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At a later date, I decided to look in Wikipedia to see if they had a list of songs that were written by A. P. Carter. Well, they did, but it was not at all what I expected: There are only 4 songs on the list. This was the real story according to the Wikipedia article on A. P. Carter: “Carter was known for traveling extensively throughout the country and collecting and blending songs, particularly from Appalachian musicians. Some of the songs became so closely identified with A. P. Carter that he has been popularly, but mistakenly, credited with writing them. For example, ‘Keep on the Sunny Side of Life’ was published in 1901 with the words being credited to Ada Blenkhorn and the music credited to Howard Entwisle, and ‘The Meeting in the Air’ has been published giving credit for music and words to I. G. Martin.”
(February 2015)
