“I Hung My Head and Cried” was co-written by Cliff Bruner and Jimmie Davis and was first recorded by Davis in 1941. Bruner was a Western swing fiddler whose Texas Wanderers were a fixture of the late-1930s and 1940s Texas honky-tonk and Western swing scenes; Davis is the Louisiana country singer (and two-term governor) best known for “You Are My Sunshine.” The pairing of the two writers reflects the broad Texas-Louisiana country songwriting circuit of the early 1940s.
The Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs reading on the 1963 Columbia album At Carnegie Hall!, performed at Carnegie Hall in New York on December 8, 1962 — is the recording most contemporary bluegrass listeners know first. The Foggy Mountain Boys lineup at the concert included Josh Graves on dobro and Paul Warren on fiddle; the Carnegie Hall album captured one of the band’s strongest live performances and helped fix Flatt & Scruggs’s place in the urban folk-revival imagination.
The lyric is a heartbreak text in the older Western-swing-into-country mould: the narrator hanging his head and crying when the woman of his life walked out the door, with verses that cycle through the after-images of the relationship. It works as a slow vocal feature in G with a strong dobro break, and the harmonic shape leaves an obvious slot for a high-tenor harmony — the kind of song bluegrass quartet vocalists return to for the chorus arrangement.
