“Angel from Montgomery,” written by John Prine, began as a conversation between Prine and potential collaborator Ed Holstein. Holstein suggested writing a song about old people, building on a previous Prine work called “Old Folks” at the time (later changed to “Hello In There.”) Prine balked at Holstein’s suggestion, saying

I said, ‘I can’t do that, because I put everything I felt about old people into that one song. How about a woman who’s middle-aged but feels older than she is?’ And he says, ‘Nah.’ So I went home and wrote ‘Angel from Montgomery’ by myself."

In John Prine: In Spite of Himself, writer Eddie Huffman calls “Angel from Montgomery” a cross between a Thoreau observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.”