Not all classic Country and Bluegrass songs are about drinking, infidelity, family ties, murder, and prison, but look for a few and you won’t have trouble finding them. One of my favorite genre subsets focuses on songs detailing a devoted mother visiting her “erring but precious son” in The Big House. The sorrowful narrative of “I’m Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail” is from the 1958 album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, a wonderful roots recording that found the Everly Brothers, then at the height of their pop fame, revisiting traditional tunes. It was a daring project that obviously had great personal importance to the two Kentucky boys who had made it very big. (Not until the advent of Hall & Oates was there a duo with such consistent pop success.)
Even more so than usual, due to the lean instrumentation that spotlights the vocals, the brothers Everly sound as if there are conjoined Siamese twins sharing lungs and vocal cords. (In fact, Don was just about two years older than Phil.) Their indivisible harmony, spectacular as it is, remains resolutely understated even as they build to the song’s dramatic climax. Talk about giving your all for your children.
The vocal harmony produced by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard didn’t call on the dulcet tones that were trademarks of the Everly Brothers. Yet who could find fault in the unvarnished splendor that these two committed folk artists brought to this 1946 maternal prison saga in a 1973 recording the duo made for Rounder Records. Here, Mama also gives her all for her wayward offspring with similar results. Sometimes a smile is about the sweetest gift a mother could bring, although a file within a cake might also have been appreciated.
Having actually spent time behind bars, the great Merle Haggard knew of what he was singing about in his original jailhouse lament that became an instant classic. His 1958-1960 stint may not have been “life without parole” as he sings in his 1968 classic, but it couldn’t have been all that much fun. (“While in prison, Haggard learned that his wife was expecting another man’s son, which stressed him psychologically.” – you have to love Wikipedia.)
Did Mama visit her baby in the pen? I don’t know, but it seems that the young Hag got to catch Johnny Cash perform for the guys at San Quentin when he was incarcerated there. That’s almost a good as a mother’s smile.
Enjoying your celebrations of popular music and the unpredictability of what genre you'll write about next. As for duos, those Simon & Garfunkel kids had a pretty good run between the Everly Brothers and Hall and Oates.