1899-2000, American country singer and two-term governor of Louisiana
James Houston Davis was a Shreveport court clerk turned Decca star who built a career partly by buying songs outright — a normal, openly practised transaction in the pre-war business, not a scandal. He recorded “You Are My Sunshine” with Charles Mitchell’s Orchestra at Decca’s New York studios on 5 February 1940, and that record, Decca 5813, is the one the world actually knows. It carried him into film, into the Louisiana governor’s office, and eventually into the National Recording Registry. Interviewed by Dorothy Horstman in 1975, Davis notably did not claim to have written it — he simply told its history.