Few singers, country or otherwise, sound so downhearted as Merle Haggard. He specialized (still does, actually) in barroom laments that worry a sentiment threadbare in only a few verses, before moving on to a just-slightly-different sentiment in a new song. His lyrics, which expound on the typical honkytonk subjects of prison, poverty, sobriety, and doomed romance, are dense with wrenching wordplay and reversals of phrases that seem to heighten his self-loathing, turning his misery into a joke so half-hearted it'll make you cry just as easily as smile.
But it's his delivery that really sells the heartache. Instead of airing his emotions publicly, Haggard stoppers them with a formidably stoic front. Crucially, his masculine façade always sounds on the verge of crumbling, but not even a line like "I'll give my everything, but you don't even try" (from "You Don't Even Try") can unleash the flood. Haggard's tears always remain private, but rather than closing off these songs, his brave-faced delivery makes them all the more sympathetic, which is their most important quality. Country music is best when listeners can relate to the songs and invest them with their own experiences-- a notion Haggard obviously buys into. He even lays it all out in "Someone Told My Story", explaining the relationship between singer and audience better than any critic could:
I played a brand-new record on the jukeboxAnd I scarcely could believe the song I heardIt told of how you left me for anotherIt was almost like I'd written every word
Someone told my story in a songThe lyrics told of happiness and homeThen it told of how you done me wrongSomeone told my story in a song
That song is from Haggard's 1967 album I'm a Lonesome Fugitive, one of ten included in Capitol's generous reissue set: five discs containing two albums each (four of the ten have never been available on CD before), along with more than 20 bonus tracks. Listening to them chronologically-- starting with Strangers in 1965 and ending with 1971's Someday We'll Look Back-- is like reading an epic American novel: Haggard has Twain's wit (no exaggeration), Steinbeck's eye for the vagaries of poor America, and Horatio Alger's bootstrap sentimentality. These albums are weighty with lyrical details drawn from Haggard's own life (his dirt-poor upbringing, rebellious adolescence, and numerous incarcerations, escapes, and marriages) and reveal an artist torn between his birthplace of California and his family's home in Oklahoma, between the familiarity of heartache and the suspected complacency of happiness, between the security of home and the lure of hopping that freight and seeing what's a little farther down the line.
Perhaps ironically, for all his ramblin' ways, Haggard wasn't much of a boundary-pusher musically-- at least not like Willie Nelson or even Johnny Cash. The Bakersfield sound he helped to pioneer, following the leads of Buck Owens and Wynn Stewart, was more a product of circumstance and geography than of concerted innovation, and his blend of traditional country, honkytonk, jazz, and rock seems fully developed on his very first songs. As a result, there's only a little deviation in sound between these 10 albums, and Haggard doesn't stray too far from his very traditional songwriting approach or rough-and-tumble subject matter. Nor does he need to. His sound is sturdy, his lyrics surprisingly complex, his structures perfectly concise. Plus, most of these songs, while not outright autobiographical, carry the weight of true experience, which makes them all the more relatable.
Released in 1965 and 1966 respectively, Strangers and Swinging Doors and the Bottle Let Me Down (the latter named for its two singles) establishes a template for nearly every song that follows: an effective formula of humor and pathos, earnest self-deprecation and randy braggadocio, with no wasted notes or words, and even fewer pretensions. Most of these tracks-- but especially these earlier numbers-- sound like they've been devised and developed in front of live audiences, their get-to-the-point directness and standout melodies all calculated to get people off their barstools and onto the dance floor, whether they're slow-dancing to "I'll Trade All of My Tomorrows" or scooting scuffed boots to "Please Mr. DJ". Haggard's band, dubbed the Strangers after his first big hit, sounds road-hardened on rollicking numbers like "The Girl Turned Ripe" (next line: "and pickers came today"), barely bottled by the strictures of the songs. They're reluctantly holding back, and occasionally they do cut loose: An incessant piano boogie drives the randy and upbeat "If You Want to Be My Woman" (off I'm a Lonesome Fugitive), and pedal-steel tears drip wearily on "I Threw Away the Rose" (from Branded), and the energetic, near-reggae "Seeing Eye Dogs" (from Sing Me Back Home) sounds like it might have been the band's favorite live number.
Pairing these albums two per disc is economic, but the choices reveal the gentle disparities between them: Strangers and Swinging Doors and the Bottle Let Me Down are well matched, but I'm a Lonesome Fugitive overshadows Branded, and Hag sounds like a warm-up to Someday We'll Look Back. Furthermore, this format reinforces the uniformity of sound across Haggard's early albums. So the banjo that kicks off "The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde" is incredibly jolting, not just because it's the first time that instrument has appeared on a Haggard song, but moreover because it reveals just how deceptively basic his sound is. He and his band were able to make the traditional setup of guitar, bass, drums, piano, and voice sound like so much more. But on Bonnie & Clyde he starts to branch out a little, toying around with arrangements and expanding his Bakersfield-based sound. A short acoustic guitar theme two-steps through "Fool's Castle", and a deep piano melody-- the left hand of rock'n'roll's boogie rhythm-- puts the question mark in "Will You Visit Me on Sundays?" As a result, Bonnie & Clyde is perhaps this set's most diverse album, showcasing the breadth of his sound and the depth of his material.
Mama Tried, however, is the highlight. Starting off with the majestically regretful title track-- which is reportedly Haggard's apology to his mother for his wayward youth-- the album collects some of his most assured and accomplished songs, including a chugging cover of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues". Pride in What I Am continues that dynamic, making that disc the most solid of these reissues. Kicking off the final disc, Hag never really gets its footing, although "The Sidewalks of Chicago" is one of Haggard's most devastating singles. Compared to that scattershot collection, Someday We'll Look Back almost sounds like a concept album: Songs like "One Row at a Time", "California Cottonfields", and "Tulare Dust" recount the Haggard family's move from Oklahoma to Oildale, California, where they lived in a converted boxcar. Although he was born in California, Haggard felt like the Midwest was his home, and Someday We'll Look Back addresses this as if it's his definitive conflict, the source of all his nervy wanderlust.
This final disc also introduces a new facet of Haggard and perhaps the most notorious: the outspoken, self-justifying, flag-waving, hippie-baiting conservative that was made famous by "Okee from Muskogee". Only a few songs here are politically charged, and those that target hippies, like "I've Done It All" and "Big Time Annie's Square", make it a class issue, treating them in much the same way early country artists ridiculed the snooty upper crust: For Haggard, hippies had the luxury for their leftist leanings, which conflicts with his blue-collar beliefs. However, on the whole, these reissues give politics a pass, omitting "Okee" when it would have been easy to sneak his most notorious hit on as a bonus track. It's a strategic decision. Without the looming shadow of Haggard's legitimate politics (which, it could be argued, have denied him his rightful popular legacy), the music becomes the primary focus, revealing the magnitude of Haggard's impact and arguing persuasively that these 10 albums are the wellspring of modern country music.
