Down the Hall is the tenth, last song on Bonnie Raitt’s new album Just Like That. You can watch a lyric video of it on YouTube. She tells a poignant story backed by a lovely mixture of guitar and organ. An article by Tina Benitez-Eves at American Songwriter on June 9, 2022 titled Bonnie Raitt inspires on album ‘Just Like That’ explains:
“In May of 2018, Raitt was also affected by a story she read in The New York Times Magazine about a prison hospice program in Vacaville, California where inmates work as caregivers for fellow terminal convicts. Staggered by her reaction to the intimate photographs and stories of volunteers devoting their time to those incarcerated at the end of their lives, she wrote her own story on ‘Down the Hall,’ singing from the perspective of the caretakers: I asked if they let family in / She said not really at the end / Truth is a lot don’t have someone, no friends or next of kin / The thought of those guys going out alone, it hit me somewhere deep / I asked could go sit with them, for some comfort and relief.
‘I just immediately felt how many segregated, separated, polarized segments of our population out in society are reflected in microcosms in prisons,’ says Raitt. ‘Those pictures, without any explanation, were such a beautiful testimony of how the need of one human being to have compassion from another, and empathy, and care was just so moving. I’m moved by it now. I can barely sing those songs without getting touched again.’ ”
The image of a prison hall was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.
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