Songfacts®:

• This Broonzy composition has no connection with later songs recorded by Carrie Underwood or Nelly; it is also sometimes given an extended title "Just A Dream I Had On My Mind" after its opening.
  
  According to a BBC documentary about Broonzy that was first screened in December 2013, the legendary bluesman wrote this song especially for the From Spirituals To Swing concerts of December 1938. Among other things, this dream sees him meeting the President at the White House, something that might have been considered extraordinary or even unthinkable for a black blues musician at that time.
  
  What was not so unthinkable was the line in which he dreams about having ten children all looking like him because Broonzy was a notorious womanizer, though it was probably a combination of alcohol and tobacco rather than women that killed him twenty years later. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England