The album's title track was inspired by an inmate Haggard knew while he was serving time in
San Quentin named Jimmy "Rabbit" Kendrick. As recounted in his 1981 autobiography
Merle Haggard: Sing Me Back Home, Rabbit devised a brilliant escape and invited Haggard to join him, but they both agreed it would be best that he stay put. Rabbit was captured two weeks later and eventually executed for the murder of a state trooper. Haggard, the "guitar playing friend", wrote the song as a tribute. Writing in the liner notes for the 1994 retrospective
Down Every Road, Daniel Cooper calls it, "a ballad that works on so many different levels of the soul it defies one's every attempt to analyze it." In a 1977 interview in
Billboard with
Bob Eubanks, Haggard reflected, "Even though the crime was brutal and the guy was an incorrigible criminal, it's a feeling you never forget when you see someone you know make that last walk. They bring him through the yard, and there's a guard in front and a guard behind - that's how you know a death prisoner. They brought Rabbit out...taking him to see the Father,...prior to his execution. That was a strong picture that was left in my mind." The track topped the country singles chart a few weeks into 1968 (his second number one in a row) and he performed it as a duet with
Johnny Cash on the latter's network television show in 1969. In his 1999 autobiography
House of Memories, Haggard states that the song had been published by Blue Book Music, a company owned by
Buck Owens, and when Haggard asked Owens for a sum of money to pay back debts incurred in
Las Vegas, Owens agreed only if he received half of “Sing Me Back Home,” to which Haggard agreed. Haggard, who later felt he had been taken, sued to get his ownership of the song back. Another key ingredient in Haggard's sound during this period was the guitar blend of
James Burton and
Roy Nichols. As Haggard explained to
Downbeat in 1980, "James was doing this thing called 'chicken pickin'. But he wasn't really bending the strings. Roy, on the other hand, was doing the string bending but wasn't doing the chicken' pickin'... Our guitar style came out of a marriage between the styles." ==Critical reception==