Tag: Sing Me Back Home

One of the many Haggard songs that my dad would play. This one along with a song called Sam Hill I heard a lot when I was a child. Sing Me Back Home was released in 1967, and it became one of Haggard’s most enduring hits.

Most people know that he spent his early adulthood behind bars for a failed attempt at robbery. While in San Quentin State Prison, Haggard wrote many songs while dreaming of freedom and life beyond the bars of a cell.

Sing Me Back Home was inspired by his fellow inmates James Rabbit and Caryl Chessman. Rabbit was executed in 1961 for killing a California Highway Patrolman, and Chessman was the first modern American executed for a non-lethal kidnapping.

Haggard and James Rabbit hatched a plan one night to escape (they would hide inside a desk he was building in the prison furniture factory), though at the last moment, Rabbit advised Haggard not to take part in the plan. Rabbit escaped, was recaptured, killed an officer, and was brought back to San Quentin to be executed. It was the first of many events to change something in Haggard’s criminal ways.

It is an incredibly sad song and you get it with the first two lines of the song. The warden led a prisoner down the hallway to his doom, I stood up to say goodbye like all the rest.  The song was on his Sing Me Back Home album released in 1968. The album peaked at #1 on the Billboard Country Album Charts. The song peaked at #1 on the Billboard Country Charts and #7 on the Canadian Country Charts.

Merle Haggard: “Something happened to me there, I came to the fork in the road and took it, you might say. And I kind of started back in the other direction, trying to make something out of myself rather than to dig myself in a deeper hole.”

Sing Me Back Home

The warden led a prisoner down the hallway to his doom
I stood up to say goodbye like all the rest
And I heard him tell the warden just before he reached my cell
Let my guitar playing friend, do my request

Let him sing me back home with a song I used to hear
Make my old memories come alive
Take me away and turn back the years
Sing me back home before I die

I recall last Sunday morning a choir from ‘cross the street
Came to sing a few old gospel songs
And I heard him tell the singers
There’s a song my mama sang
Can I hear once before we move along?

Sing me back home, the song my mama sang
Make my old memories come alive
Take me away and turn back the years
Sing me back home before I die

Sing me back home before I die

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