"San Francisco Is a Lonely Town" is a song written in 1969 by the Nashville songwriter Ben Peters.
The novelist and songwriter Alice Randall reviewed Linda Martell's album Color Me Country in 2010, and wrote:The second cut, the Ben Peters–penned "San Francisco Is a Lonely Town," is a variation on the Harlan Howard masterpiece "Streets of Baltimore."
Here a young couple sets off on a Greyhound for San Francisco, only to discover the distractions of the big city dilute love.
Peters, who wrote a signature song for country legend Charley Pride ("Kiss an Angel Good Morning"), captures the spunk and sorrow of the adventure—but more interestingly, Martell's performance captures a bit of San Francisco few have seen—the kids who arrived not in beat-up Volkswagens but on the bus; the kids who weren't white, who were brown; the kids who came not from Eastern cities, but from Southern towns.
Linda Martell portrays just such a girl-woman convincingly.