IIIrd Tyme Out
I Hung My Head and Cried
“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! — the version associated with this entry, 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.