“Shackles and Chains” is credited to Jimmie Davis, the Louisiana singer who served two terms as the state’s governor, from 1944 to 1948 and from 1960 to 1964, and whose most popular record was “You Are My Sunshine.” Davis recorded it for Decca on 9 December 1937 at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, with Charles Mitchell on steel guitar, and Decca issued it as 5492 in March 1938.
The song is spoken by a man being taken away in shackles and chains on a long journey to a prison where he will stay until he dies. He tells his darling not to cry. At night, he says, he will look through the bars at the stars and dream of her kisses, with a piece of stone for a pillow. In the last verse he asks her to put her arms through the bars and let him kiss her once more, because she has been his comfort in heartache and his refuge in sorrow.
Mac Wiseman recorded it in November 1952 at Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel, with Oscar Sullivan on mandolin, Ed Amos on banjo, Tommy Jackson on fiddle and Ernie Newton on bass, and Dot released it in January 1953 with “Going Like Wildfire” on the other side. The Stanley Brothers cut it at King’s studio in Cincinnati on 15 September 1959, Carter Stanley singing lead over Ralph Stanley’s tenor, with Bill Napier on mandolin and baritone and George Shuffler on bass and bass vocal; it came out in 1960 on the King LP Everybody’s Country Favorites.
Jimmy Martin recorded it at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, on 2 May 1969 for his Decca album Free Born Man, and Decca also released it as a single backed with “Milwaukee, Here I Come.” Wiseman went back to the song with the Osborne Brothers in April 1979 for The Essential Bluegrass Album on CMH. Earl Scruggs and Tom T. Hall included it on The Storyteller and the Banjoman (Columbia, 1982), with Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell singing alongside Hall.
