Let my guitar playing friend do my request
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| Jerry Garcia |
I first remember hearing Merle Haggard’s song “Sing Me Back Home,” which we introduced in the previous post, in a cover version performed by Richard Shindell. It’s possible I heard a taped Grateful Dead version before then, but Shindell’s is the first one I remember. Shindell added the song as a hidden track at the end of his album Reunion Hill, following another cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning.” I’ve tried to find a streamable version of Shindell’s performance, but have come up empty so far. [Update, February 1, 2014: Shindell’s version is now available on Spotify, starting at minute 5 on this track.]
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| Richard Shindell |
Finding the right tone for a song is a delicate business, and we’ve reviewed before some of the challenges for singers in “inhabiting” a song in an authentic or believable way. Haggard has the “advantage,” relative to “Sing Me Back Home,” of having literally done the time, which gives him instant credibility, even if he’s not all that happy about it. Beyond this matching of singer to the song, however, there’s also the challenge striking the arrangement that reinforces or reinterprets the song, and doesn’t undercut it. Some portion of this is a matter of taste, I’m sure, but getting it “wrong” can transform the song’s implicit meanings, and give you a much different song.
There are more covers of “Sing Me Back Home” out there than I can coherently review here, so I’ll use this issue of tone or fit to the lyrics as a sorting device. I’m going to wind up leaving out a lot of straightforward country covers that otherwise display fine musicianship, just because they don’t add much that’s new. You may or may not agree with my take, and I might not agree with my own take a few months from now, but I at least hope we’ll find some illuminating contrast. In addition to selecting tracks for this line of discussion, I’ll also lift up some performances that have some significance in how this song has made its way through the past 45 years or so of music history.
A fine line
Most cover artists take the performance of “Sing Me Back Home” straightforwardly, and don’t stray too far from the approach that Haggard himself takes. Part of the challenge, given the serious subject matter, is to balance that sober recognition of the condemned man’s coming death with the way that music for him (and presumably for us) represents a continuing source of life, even under those conditions.
Some stray a little too far into the sober, somber, or downright lugubrious territory. Here the Everly Brothers probably leave a little too much room for basking in their own harmonies.
In some ways, this is understandable, singers want to play to their strengths. Joan Baez‘s version goes in a similar direction, probably for similar reasons.
The potential downside to this approach, though, is that the performance implicitly pities the condemned man more than it empathizes with him. We move away from him rather than finding solidarity or a point of common humanity with him. Based on my previous post, you might see how I think this is a rather crucial point. Where Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” connected, his “Okie from Muskogee” created distance. Performances that cross the fine line between empathy and pity also have a tendency to create distance. These differences change how we understand the song.
Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards take the song and give it a slow country, honky-tonk torch song quality. While the tempo slows here as well, and maybe alludes more to a roadhouse bar than to a prison, they pull it off somehow. It may be just that I’m swayed by my impression of who Faithfull and Richards are, or that the song gains credibility through Faithfull’s distinctive vocal approach.
Faithfull performed the song in 2011 as a dedication to the memory of Amy Winehouse, in the immediate aftermath of Winehouse’s death. You can hear that performance on YouTube here.
I shall be released
The Grateful Dead, who performed this song between 1971 and 1973, also take a slow tempo approach, but surround the two verses and the chorus of this song with several more minutes of musical riffing on the theme of the song. To my hear, Jerry Garcia achieves that sympathetic quality, without lapsing over into pity. Perhaps much depends on whether or not you might picture the singer as one of those prisoners. Beyond this, there’s also a way in which the Dead’s live performance takes the listener through that familiar journey from penance to redemption. Musically, it’s a celebration of release from life’s burdens at the end. Our condemned prisoner finds not only solace, but salvation. And he’s not alone.
(You can find a comparable version on YouTube here.)
The Grateful Dead were but one of several bands of the late 60s and early 70s who embraced Haggard’s country music, folding it into a broader repertoire of more hippy friendly country rock. The Byrds, who performed other Haggard standards (we’ll get to one soon) and even a crowd-pleasing, tongue-in-cheek “Okie from Muskogee,” also provide a rocking version of “Sing Me Back Home,” with a few twangy jam-band breaks.
Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers provide another performance in this vein, spot on in terms of tone.
A song about the songs
Bluegrass music has its sacred and secular varieties. Somewhere in between are the bluegrass songs that are about sacred songs, without actually being sacred songs themselves. Think of Hazel Dickens‘s “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me,” (also performed by Hot Rize) or “Preaching, Praying, Singing,” by The Country Gentlemen. “Sing Me Back Home” is like that in being a song about music; it refers back to true sacred songs and others. It gets a bluegrass/newgrass treatment from The Seldom Scene. The arrangement here is much looser, with a lot of the instrumental riffs being ornamental and sometimes a bit disconnected from the general direction of the song.
Saving two of my preferred versions for last, I’ll start with San Francisco-based musician and “roller-skating enthusiast,” Edith Frost, who performs the song on The Executioner’s Last Songs an effort brought together by Chicago-based alt.country pioneer Jon Langford. The album was created to benefit the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project, seeking an abolition of the death penalty in that state. Frost’s performance definitely channels Haggard’s tone. It’s a straightforward band arrangement, but stands out among female interpreters of the song.
Finally, Virgil Shaw gives us a distinctive take on the song on his 2002 album Still Falling (this is a Bandcamp site, and you can hear a recording of the track there), breaking out of some of its conventions, improvising a number of ways through them. I can’t explain it yet, but somehow his periodic break into falsetto works, although it is a little amusing. Perhaps it is a version of a high, lonesome sound, in this case adapted to a prison song. It may not be for everyone, but comes through with sincerity and Shaw’s own distinctive stamp.
Next up
I think we’ll have just one more post for this week, taking a look at a murder ballad proper from Merle Haggard, and see just how it might help inform our understanding an emotional or artistic starting point of “Sing Me Back Home” and other key works from Haggard’s prison songs.