All Good Times Are Past And Gone: A Song History

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"All the Good Times Are Past and Gone" is an anonymous song from the American South, catalogued in the Traditional Ballad Index (Roud 7421) under the themes of love, separation and hard times.[1] Among its references the Index lists a version in Vance Randolph's Ozark collection.[1] No author is known, and the sources consulted here say nothing firm about where or when the song first took shape.

1937 photograph of an abandoned, sagging wooden tenant cabin standing alone in flat Mississippi Delta farmland

Dorothea Lange, “Abandoned tenant cabin of the Mississippi Delta,” photograph, July 1937. Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The earliest recording named in the sources consulted here dates from 1930, by Gertrude Gossett and a partner whom the Ballad Index calls Ted and SecondHandSongs calls Fred.[1][2] The brothers Charlie and Bill Monroe, as the Monroe Brothers, put it on a Bluebird 78 (B-7191) backed with "Let Us Be Lovers Again"; the Smithsonian's copy dates the record to 1937, while the Ballad Index gives 1936.[3][1] Bill Monroe recorded it again in Nashville in December 1966 with his Blue Grass Boys, for the Decca album Blue Grass Time (1967).[4]

The song turns up in beginner bluegrass jam teaching: an Idaho Bluegrass Association jam blog featured it as a song of the week, describing it as a waltz built on the same chord progression as "Amazing Grace" and pointing learners to a Flatt & Scruggs recording.[5] In 2020 Gillian Welch and David Rawlings recorded it and named their album All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone) after it;[6] the record, made at home on a reel-to-reel machine, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album.[7]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "All the Good Times Are Past and Gone".
  2. SecondHandSongs: "All the Good Times Are Passed and Gone".
  3. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "All the Good Times Are Passed and Gone; Let Us Be Lovers Again".
  4. Bluegrass Discography (ibiblio): "Blue Grass Time".
  5. Idaho Bluegrass Association: "All The Good Times Are Past And Gone info".
  6. Wikipedia: "All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone)".
  7. American Songwriter: "Grammys, 2021: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings Win Grammy for Best Folk Album for 'All The Good Times'".