“Behind These Prison Walls of Love” was written by Bill Bolick of the Blue Sky Boys, together with Hazel Hope Jarrard, and the Blue Sky Boys made the first recording in the late 1940s. The brothers’ spare, close-harmony style — guitar and mandolin, two voices, little else — set the template for the song.
The title turns on a gentle conceit: the singer is not in a literal jail but held willingly “behind these prison walls of love,” bound to a sweetheart he has no wish to escape. That play on the era’s many genuine prison songs gave the number a tender, slightly wry character.
The Country Gentlemen recorded it in 1961 on an album of folk songs and bluegrass, and the song has since been taken up by Peter Rowan and other traditional acts — one of several Blue Sky Boys pieces that passed from the brother-duet era into the bluegrass repertoire.
