“The Prisoner’s Song” was recorded by Vernon Dalhart on August 13, 1924 for Victor in New York, with Carson Robison on guitar and Lou Raderman on viola. Dalhart’s reading paired with “Wreck of the Old 97” on the B-side became the first million-selling country record — the eventual sales figure climbed to roughly seven million copies, an extraordinary number for the 1920s recorded-music market and the biggest-selling non-holiday record of the first seventy years of recorded sound.
The song’s authorship is contested. Dalhart copyrighted it under the name of his cousin Guy Massey, who had sung it while staying at Dalhart’s home; Massey in turn had reportedly heard it from his brother Robert, who may have heard it during prison time. Nathaniel Shilkret — the Victor music director who actually arranged what Dalhart brought into the studio — protested for decades that the music as Dalhart presented it was unusable and that he had effectively rewritten it. Dalhart’s family and the Shilkret family fought unsuccessfully through the 1950s over royalties.
The lyric is a prison-narrator piece: the singer locked up and longing for the partner he left behind, the bars closing him off from any chance of return. Bill Monroe’s 1952 Decca recording brought the song into the bluegrass canon, with Monroe’s high tenor lead pulling the older country reading into the harder bluegrass register.
