Songfacts®:

• Often credited with launching the honky-tonk genre of country music, Ernest Tubb's first hit finds him pacing through his house, wishing his lost love would come back home. Tubb was allegedly inspired to write the song when his wife temporarily left him after a spat over finances.
• The groundbreaking, Texas-born troubadour Ernest Tubb was the first country music star to use electric guitar, which is supplied by Fay "Smitty" Smith on the track, accompanying Tubb's acoustic rhythm guitar. It was recorded in Dallas on April 26, 1941.
  
  Tubb was drawn to the electric guitar for a very practical reason: it was loud. By using this instrument on this track, it cut through the din a honky tonks and other boisterous venues.
• Forget walkin' the floor – the single walked its way up the national pop charts to #23 in 1941 (the country music chart wasn't established until 1944).
• Tubb recorded this a handful of times throughout his career, including a version with his band The Texas Troubadours in 1963, and a rendition with Merle Haggard in 1979. Not only did the collaboration land at #31 on the Country chart that year, it was also Tubb's final hit.
• Tubb performed this when he appeared in the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic, Coal Miner's Daughter.
• Several singers covered this, including Bing Crosby, Patti Page, Glen Campbell, and George Hamilton IV. Hamilton's 1965 single, featured on his album Mister Sincerity…A Tribute To Ernest Tubb, peaked at #18 on the Country chart. The song has twice made the Hot 100: first by Georgia Gibbs at #92 in 1957, then for Pat Boone at #44 in 1960.
• This was used in the 2015 Hank Williams biopic, I Saw The Light. It was also featured in Rob Zombie's 2016 horror flick, 31.
• Tubb, who died in 1984 at age 70, gave his final performance on August 14, 1982 at the Grand Ole Opry. "Walkin' The Floor Over You" was his last song.
• "Walkin' the Floor Over You" earned entry to the National Recording Registry in 2022 because of its novel use of electric guitar that made it "influential far beyond the confines of country music."