Essential Albums
- By the time Merle Haggard released Mama Tried in 1968, the assorted drunks, convicts, and misanthropes that had populated his early songs had become a central theme. Haggard doesn’t make you feel bad for his sinners; in most cases, he doesn’t even have them repent. If anything, what makes Mama Tried a classic is that Haggard forces his characters to stand as they are—without judgment, pity, gospel choirs, or violins. The steady commitment to self-destruction that makes them interesting to encounter in art would make them impossible to handle in real life. So if you feel for the man serving life without parole in “Mama Tried,” or for the alcoholic chasing his own oblivion in “Little Ole Wine Drinker Me”—it’s not because Haggard is inviting your empathy. Such characters function as Rorschach tests, allowing the listeners to interpret them however they see fit. Still, even if Haggard doesn’t pass judgment on Mama Tried, this is an album full of sinners: They’ll calmly tell you that they’ll never love you (“Too Many Bridges to Cross Over”), or that they killed someone because they felt like it (“Folsom Prison Blues”). And while they’re comfortable with who they are, there are a few moments of introspection on Mama Tried: “Revenge must be the reason/Why forgiveness was a thing I never knew,” Haggard sings on “I’ll Always Know.” As self-reflection goes, at least that’s a start.
- With 1967’s I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, the spare, tough sound that Merle Haggard had been refining all decade long finally snapped into focus. Compared to the countrypolitan artists of the day—who were pop-friendly and string-oriented—Haggard was a reactionary, stripping away the polish to expose the bones underneath. And if countrypolitan had marked Nashville’s expansion into the broader stream of American music, Haggard represented a retreat to the pre-pop dawn of Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Williams. Just as rock music continually dies, only to be defibrillated by young purists taking things back to basics, Haggard used I'm a Lonesome Fugitive to remind people what country music had once been: raw, sentimental, out on bail—and a little bit drunk. The title track was Haggard’s first signature song, and its success kicked off one of the most unprecedented runs in music, country or otherwise: 34 Top 10 singles in a row. Haggard’s voice had a pure, brassy quality that made his tough-guy songs believable (“Drink Up and Be Somebody,” “Skid Row”) and his weepy ones even more so (“Whatever Happened to Me”). And in a genre that often divided artists into those who wrote and those who sang, Haggard was also one of modern country’s first singer-songwriters, a designation that eventually helped him catch on with rock-oriented audiences who, post-Dylan, considered him a representative of authenticity and self-reliance. But most of all, Fugitive’s strength is its emotional sleight of hand: Haggard could make the bad times sound good.
Compilations
About Merle Haggard & The Strangers
Merle Haggard & The Strangers came busting out of Bakersfield, CA, in the ’60s to change the country-music scene with a rough-edged roadhouse sound and an outlaw stance that inspired generations of country renegades.
- FROM
- Bakersfield, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 1966
- GENRE
- Country