Beautiful Brown Eyes: A Song History

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“Beautiful Brown Eyes” as most people know it goes back to a 1937 record by the Arthur Smith Trio: the Tennessee fiddler Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith with the brothers Alton and Rabon Delmore on guitars and vocals. Discographies date the session to August 3, 1937, in Charlotte, North Carolina.[1][2] The song is credited to Alton Delmore and Arthur Smith.[2][3] The Delmores, natives of Elkmont, Alabama, had joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1933 and become one of its most popular acts, and they had been touring and recording with Smith since the mid-1930s.[3][4][5] The sources consulted here do not establish an older folk original behind the song.

Watercolor portrait of a brown-eyed young woman with curled hair and a white high-waisted dress, framed in an oval

John Smart, Portrait of Miss Mary Tadman, watercolor and graphite, 1809. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The song had its biggest success fourteen years later. Rosemary Clooney recorded it in New York in January 1951 with an orchestra directed by Mitch Miller, for Columbia, with the Delmore–Smith credit on the label.[6] It became her first hit, eventually selling some 400,000 copies,[7] and later that year another Miller-backed record gave her a number one.[7][8] Jimmy Wakely’s Capitol recording, meanwhile, ranked among the year’s best-selling country and western records.[3][9] According to a biography of the Delmore Brothers, Alton saw little of the money from these hits and, short of funds to fight a dispute over the song, sold his rights cheaply; accounts of that episode differ, and the details are not settled in the sources consulted here.[3]

The 1951 records carried the song far beyond its string-band beginnings. In July 1960 the folk song collector Max Hunter recorded Mrs. Louise Williams singing it in Fayetteville, Arkansas, as a song of a marriage gone wrong and promises broken.[10] Many other performers are said to have recorded it since, among them Merle Travis with Johnny Bond.[11]

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Sources

  1. Discogs: "Arthur Smith Trio – Beautiful Brown Eyes / Beautiful Memories".
  2. SecondHandSongs: "Beautiful Brown Eyes by Arthur Smith Trio".
  3. The Delmore Brothers: "Unpublished and illustrated biography".
  4. Wikipedia: "Fiddlin' Arthur Smith".
  5. Wikipedia: "The Delmore Brothers".
  6. Discogs: "Rosemary Clooney – Beautiful Brown Eyes / Shot Gun Boogie".
  7. Encyclopedia.com: "Rosemary Clooney".
  8. Wikipedia: "Rosemary Clooney discography".
  9. Wikipedia: "Billboard Top Country & Western Records of 1951".
  10. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes".
  11. SecondHandSongs: "Beautiful Brown Eyes written by Alton Delmore, Arthur Smith".