The Prisoner's Song: A Song History

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“The Prisoner’s Song” was published in 1924 by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. with Guy Massey named as its writer.[1] Massey was a cousin of the singer Vernon Dalhart, who learned the song from Massey, and Massey in turn reportedly had it from his older brother Robert.[1][2] Who actually wrote it is less settled. The Traditional Ballad Index notes that Dalhart gave inconsistent accounts of its parts, and it summarizes Walter Darrell Haden’s account, in which Massey supplied only a few written-out lines and Victor’s music director Nathaniel Shilkret expanded the text and set it to a tune.[3] Shilkret pressed his claim in the 1930s, filing a copyright claim and asking the publisher for an accounting; the publisher held that Massey, who had died in San Antonio in 1925, was the author.[1] The same 1936 report dismissed a popular tale that the song had been written by a prisoner facing death.[1] Folk-song scholars also link parts of it to older folk songs and to widely shared floating verses.[3]

1927 photograph of a tiered cell wing behind steel bars and mesh inside the District of Columbia jail

Harris & Ewing, a cell wing of the District of Columbia jail, glass negative, April 11, 1927. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Dalhart recorded the song for Victor in New York on August 13, 1924, singing to Lou Raderman’s viola and Carson Robison’s guitar, and the issued take appeared on Victor 19427.[4] Victor had brought Dalhart in to cut his own version of “The Wreck of the Old 97” after Henry Whitter’s record of it caught on, and “The Prisoner’s Song” was his suggestion for the other side.[2] The pairing is widely described as country music’s first million-selling record, though sales estimates vary enormously across the sources consulted here, from about one million to several million and, in some accounts, far more.[1][2][3][5] Its success steered Dalhart toward rural material for most of the next decade, and the recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.[5] The song has since been collected from singers in the United States, Canada and Ireland.[3]

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Sources

  1. TIME: "Music: Shilkret's Song" (October 5, 1936).
  2. Nashville Songwriters Foundation: "Vernon Dalhart".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Prisoner's Song (I), The".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-30633. The prisoner's song / Vernon Dalhart".
  5. Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum: "Vernon Dalhart".