“Won’t You Come and Sing for Me” was written by Hazel Dickens and recorded by Dickens and Alice Gerrard on their 1973 Folkways album Won’t You Come and Sing For Me. The Dickens-Gerrard recordings of the early 1970s were among the most consequential of the early-bluegrass-revival era, and this song is one of Dickens’s most-covered original compositions.
The lyric is a deathbed-vigil piece: the narrator, on her sickbed, calls her friends to come and sing for her one last time before she goes. The conceit pulls on older Southern-gospel funeral-and-wake tradition while remaining unmistakably contemporary in its first-person directness. Dickens’s hard-edged lead vocal and Alice Gerrard’s harmony — together one of the most distinctive female-duo sounds in bluegrass — give the recording its emotional centre.
The song crossed widely into bluegrass and folk repertoires through the 1970s and 1980s and has been covered by Emmylou Harris, Iris DeMent, Tim O’Brien, the Cox Family, and a long list of acoustic and bluegrass acts. The harmonic shape is open and modal-flavoured, the tempo sits in the slow range, and the song works as a vocal feature with a strong harmony slot on the chorus refrain.
