John Hartford wrote “In Tall Buildings” and recorded it in 1975 at the Sound Shop in Nashville for Nobody Knows What You Do, which Flying Fish issued in 1976. Hartford, who had moved to Nashville in 1965 and whose “Gentle on My Mind” won Grammy awards in 1968, played banjo and sang on the album. Its credits list Benny Martin on fiddle and guitar, Sam Bush on mandolin, Roy Huskey Jr. on bass and Kenny Malone on drums, with Martin, Bush and Mac Wiseman singing harmony.
The song is sung to someone the narrator calls “baby,” and it looks ahead to the day he is grown. When others have taught him all they can, they will sell him a suit, cut his hair and send him to work in tall buildings. The chorus says goodbye to the sunshine, the dew, the flowers and the person he is singing to as he hurries to catch the subway so as not to be late. The last verse jumps to retirement: his life is his own again, the payments are made, and he is left to wonder what happened in the years between.
Hartford died in June 2001, and the song soon turned up on tribute records. Gillian Welch sang it alone with her guitar on A Tribute to John Hartford: Live from Mountain Stage (Blue Plate Music, July 2001). Jamie Hartford included it on Part of Your History: The Songs of John Hartford (2005), and John Carter Cash and Jamie Hartford, joined by Norman Blake and Jerry Douglas, recorded it for On the Road: A Tribute to John Hartford (LoHi Records, 2020). Sam Bush, who had played mandolin on the 1975 session, made it the third track of his Smithsonian Folkways album Radio John: Songs of John Hartford (2022), singing lead and playing guitar, banjo and mandolin himself. Other recordings include fiddler Maddie Denton’s on Playin’ in This Town (2021) and Matt Maltese’s on Songs That Aren’t Mine (2024).
