This song was written by Irwin Levine and Larry Brown (credited as L. Russell Brown), who wrote the previous #1 hit for the group, " Knock Three Times ." The song is based on a story called "Going Home" that Levine read in the January 1972 edition of the magazine Reader's Digest . The story was originally published in the New York Post on October 14, 1971, appearing in a column called "The Eight Million" written by Pete Hamill. In the story, six kids riding a bus from New York to Fort Lauderdale strike up a conversation with a man named Vingo, who tells them he was just released from prison after four years in jail. He told his wife, Martha, that she could start a new life without him, and for the last three-and-a-half years of his incarceration, he didn't hear from her. In his last letter to her, he gave her instructions. The story reads: We used to live in this town, Brunswick, just before Jacksonville, and there's a big oak tree just