Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys
Sing Me Back Home
Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys (1975) Bluegrass Discography
“Sing Me Back Home” was written by Merle Haggard, released as a single in November 1967, and spent two weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart — his third number-one hit. The song was inspired by his time at San Quentin State Prison, where Haggard served time beginning in February 1958: a fellow inmate named Jimmy “Rabbit” Kendrick, whom Haggard knew well, escaped from custody, killed a state trooper during recapture, and was ultimately executed. The song is about watching a condemned man make his last walk, the narrator asking a fellow prisoner to “sing me a song from way back home” as he goes. Haggard wrote it after his release rather than inside San Quentin; the source was direct personal experience. “It’s a feeling you never forget,” he recalled, “when you see someone you know make that last walk.”
The song became the title track of his fifth studio album, Sing Me Back Home (Capitol Records, January 2, 1968), which reached #1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. Johnny Cash had made the prisoner’s perspective a country-music subject a decade earlier; Haggard’s San Quentin songs gave that tradition a more interior quality — the narrator inside the system rather than observing it from outside.
The featured version is the original 1967 Haggard recording with the Strangers. The song remains among the most direct accounts of capital punishment in the country-music canon — not protest, not advocacy, simply the feeling of watching a man walk away, remembered by someone who was there.
