You are My Sunshine by Robert Mann Reveals a Connection Between Country Music and Louisiana Politics

 You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis & the Biography of a Song is Robert Mann’s insightful examination of Louisiana’s official state song and the Louisiana politician who claimed to have composed it.  In addition, Mann’s book explores the relationship between country music and Southern politics in the 1930s and 1940s.

Like most Americans, I had long assumed that Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis wrote “You Are My Sunshine,” but in fact, he did not. As Mann relates in his book’s first chapter, Davis and Charles Mitchell purchase the song’s copyright from Paul Rice in 1939, along with the right to list themselves as the song’s authors. 

At the time of the transaction, Davis was an up-and-coming star in the world of country music, which in the 1930s was more commonly called hillbilly music. After Davis and Mitchell purchased the song, “You Are My Sunshine” became famous worldwide and was eventually recorded by over 200 artists, including Johnny Cash, Bing Crosby, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ray Charles.

Davis was also an aspiring Louisiana politician who would serve two terms as governor of Louisiana. As a singer and country music performer, Davis honed a folksy public speaking style and became a facile radio performer. Like Wilbert “Pappy” O’Daniel, who campaigned for the Texas Governorship with the Lightcrust Doughboys, Davis recruited his own country band to accompany him on the campaign trail.

As Mann explained, Louisiana politicians were split into two hostile camps in the 1930s and 1940s: the Long faction and the anti-Long forces. Neither group had a rigid political agenda beyond keeping the rival faction out of power. Davis was elected to the governorship in 1944, partly because both the Long and anti-Long parties found him palatable, and voters saw him as a unifier who could bring harmony to Louisiana’s fractious political culture.

Davis was elected to a second term as governor in 1960. Unfortunately, his tenure was marred by his state’s adamant opposition to school desegregation.  When a federal judge ordered the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools, Davis “sent a squad of State Police troopers to New Orleans to enforce a state-ordered school holiday.”

As Mann pointed out, Davis was not branded as a virulent racist in the stamp of Alabama Governor George Wallace and other Southern governors of the time. Still, he was an implacable foe of integrated schools. Indeed, Davis allied himself with Leander Perez, the district attorney in Plaquemines Parish and a rabid racist whose opposition to the desegregation of Catholic schools in the New Orleans Archdiocese was so strident that the Catholic Church excommunicated him.

Mann’s book sketches the portrait of a flawed and complicated man. The son of a poor sharecropper in Quitman, LA, he discovered a way to advance himself through country music. He was among the first poor Southern boys who clawed their way off the farms to create a unique style of American music: Bob Wills of Kosse, TX; Elvis Presley of Tupelo, MS; Hank Williams of Mount Olive, AL; Johnny Cash of Kingsland, AR, and many others.

Louisianians will best remember Jimmy Davis as a country music and gospel music star and forget his second term as Louisiana governor. He was a gifted country music artist who could not rise above the prejudices of his time.