Sing Me Back Home

The song is sung by a prisoner who plays guitar. As the warden leads a condemned man down the hallway, the man stops at the singer’s cell and asks to hear a song from home, one that will bring old memories back and turn back the years before he dies. A second verse remembers a choir that came in from outside the Sunday before to sing gospel songs, and the same man asking them for a song his mother used to sing.

Haggard recorded it at Capitol’s studio on North Vine Street in Hollywood on 20 September 1967, with Ken Nelson and Fuzzy Owen producing, after a first attempt two days earlier went unissued. Glen Campbell, Tommy Collins, Billy Mize and Lewis Talley played guitars, Norman Hamlet steel, Roy Nichols and Howard Lowe bass, Eddie Burris drums and George French piano, with Bonnie Owens singing harmony. Capitol issued it in the autumn of 1967 as single 2017, backed with “Good Times” from the same session. It spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard country chart, his third chart-topper, and became the title track of the album Sing Me Back Home, released on 2 January 1968, which also went to number one on the country albums chart.

Bluegrass musicians took it up within a few years. A performance by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard from the late 1960s was issued in 2018 as the title track of Sing Me Back Home: The DC Tapes, 1965–1969. Leon Morris recorded it in 1972, the Seldom Scene put it on Act 3 (Rebel, 1973), and Joe Val & the New England Bluegrass Boys included it on their 1975 Rounder album; Bob Paisley & the Southern Grass followed on I Still Love You Yet in 1985. Outside bluegrass, the Everly Brothers recorded it for Roots in 1968, and the Grateful Dead played it in concert between 1971 and 1973.