Merle Haggard - Sing Me Back Home

As whole albums go, Sing Me Back Home is a relatively minor entry into Merle Haggard's early catalog.  Most of the early Capitol Hag albums are built around a hit, a few potential hits, and some filler.  While you can't name a 60's Merle Haggard album that I don't enjoy from beginning to end, it's true that the good stuff is more concentrated on some albums than it is on others.  In other words, an album stands or falls based on the quality of the filler, and Sing Me Back Home has quite a bit more filler than it has potential hits.

The title track is nice and solid--stately and emotional, with a sort of anthemic quality that's a new thing for Haggard at this point in his career.  There are a couple of good drinking songs--"Wine Take Me Away" and the heartbroken "I'll Leave the Bottle On the Bar," as well as the catchy mid-tempo "Where Does the Good Times Go?"  "Seeing Eye Dog" is the most Bakersfield-sounding track on the disc and probably my favorite, with a pounding tempo, nimble steel guitar and some powerful vocals from Merle.  Add to the list the well-handled novelty tune "Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp" (it's a surprisingly jolly tune about an abandoned single mother who provides for her 14 children by becoming a prostitute) and you've hit the album's brightest spots, songwriting-wise.  Elsewhere Merle mines the songs of his Bakersfield forbears, with the somewhat out-of-place "Mom and Dad's Waltz" and tosses off the similar yet similarly out-of-place "Home is Where a Kid Grows Up." Songs like "Look Over Me," "If You See My Baby" and "My Past is Present" lack the wit, verve and hooks of their like on earlier Hag albums, though there's nothing objectively wrong with them.

Still, Sing Me Back Home is an enjoyable listen irrespective of the quality of the individual songs--the production is sterling, with a lot of close-miked guitars, drum kits and backing vocals, and Merle's vocals are worth paying close attention to for an entire listen for the depth of nuance and subtle emotion; he's not quite singing the phone book, but it's clear that his (and his band's) abilities as performers are capable of elevating material much higher than its weaknesses would seem to allow.

Get it here on CD or MP3.

Merle Haggard - Strangers

Take a look at Merle Haggard on 1965's Strangers: even with that silly tie and leaning on that tiny guitar, he already knows he's a badass.  As might be expected, though, the full flower of Merle's greatness hasn't quite bloomed on this, his debut.  To my ears the reason is a combination of production/style and material.  It's pretty clear that Merle's being pitched as more of a crooner, with an emphasis on ballads and smooth melodies--too often the arrangements include big string arrangements and Nashville Patsy Cline-style backup singers, and the amount of reverb would suggest that Merle was performing inside a cave.  In retrospect it's easy to criticize the production choices, but it's worth mentioning that the more muscular Bakersfield brand of country that became Merle's signature was still in its very early stages in 1965--though Together Again/My Heart Skips A Beat had already been released in '64, there wasn't much precedent for the Bakersfield lightning bolt Haggard was about to call down in 1966's Swinging Doors and The Bottle Let Me Down.

So, that brings us to the material.  There are a handful of good-to-very-good songs, my favorites being "I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can" (or my name ain't Merle), the ridiculously awesome vocal on "Sing A Sad Song" (probably the only place where the crooner image actually fits), the title track, and "You Don't Have Very Far To Go" (for some reason Merle's recorded this song on at least three studio albums; my favorite version is on Branded Man).  Oh yeah, we also get a dynamite song title--"The Worst is Yet to Come."  There are a few bombs, too, like the novelty tune "Sam Hill," and a few bland ballads like "Falling for You" and "You Don't Even Try."  Merle's signature writing style was on its way to fulfillment, but he's only got writing credit on half of the songs, and it's pretty clear he didn't pick all of the covers (a glance at later albums' writing credits reveals that Merle had really good taste in filler; that's why the albums are so good).  Instead of a classic Hag album, we get a soft launch;   Strangers is a pleasant enough listen but I'm always left thirsting for a little more energy or a little bit better writing.  Thankfully the next nine albums of originals deliver better on both counts every single time.


Get it here in CD or MP3, along with the immortal Swinging Doors and The Bottle Let Me Down.

Merle Haggard - Someday We'll Look Back

Merle Mondays continue with the Hag's 1971 tour de force.  As if releasing a progressive gem in Hag earlier in the year wasn't enough, Merle saw fit to bestow upon us an even better album of bewitchingly eclectic Bakersfield country in Someday We'll Look Back.

Although my favorite side of Merle is the hard-edged Bakersfield honky-tonk sound with lots of steel guitar, I just can't fault this album (or Merle's entry in the "widest sideburn in the world" competition).  This album blends Merle's songwriting mastery (it's clear that by 1971 he'd achieved an uncommon level of assurance in his songwriting abilities) with some of his most mature vocals and a dizzying array of country blended from everything from Latin to blues on through to jazz, swing and even straight-up pop.

Though it's a mellow listen, this is classic Hag through and through--we get a dig at hippies in "Big Time Annie's Square," a badass prison song in "Huntsville" ("the man better keep both eyes on me/or they're gonna lose ol' Hag"), and some crushing heartbreak laments like "I'd Rather Be Gone."  What really tugs at my heart strings, though, is the authentic nostalgia that pervades the whole set--from the hit title track to the wistful, bittersweet imagery of "California Cottonfields," "Tulare Dust" and "One Row at a Time," Haggard has a way of sizing up his past in such a way that the emotion and sense of remembrance is overwhelming--when Merle sings "California cottonfields--as close to wealth as daddy ever came," you know he lived it.  There are Haggard albums I reach for more often, but this album is like a warm embrace from a relative you haven't seen in years.

Get it here on CD or MP3, along with the similarly strong Hag.

Merle Haggard - Branded Man

Yeah, that's right, there used to be such a thing as good country, and we're not talking about pill-popping tough-guy posers, we're talking about the guy who was in San Quentin for armed robbery when said legend performed there.  In spite of his heavenly pipes, Merle has always resonated with me because of his realism and authenticity--he writes and sings about what he knows, most often drinking, heartbreak and jail.

Branded Man was my first Merle Haggard album and still one of my very favorites.  Merle hits some glorious notes on this album both low (on "I Threw Away the Rose" and "Some of Us Never Learn") and high (on "Long Black Limousine" and "I Made the Prison Band").  A lot of these songs trade on the time-honored country trope of cheesy wordplay (a tradition that has somehow even remained in shitty contemporary country):  lines like "If you're trying to break my heart/You don't have very far to go" are glorious in their down-home cleverness, while elsewhere Haggard, referring to his past days of wine and roses, admits with a straight face "I kept the wine and threw away the rose."  There are many facets of this album's glory, from the track titles--some of which stand alone quite well--to the unbounded variety.  Merle goes from classic Bakersfield honky tonk to jazz to Spanish-flavored and back again in a very short time, and the Strangers have no trouble adapting to the style changes.  I swear, country music probably has the best session musicians out of any music genre.  Though there are a couple of driving Bakersfield numbers, I wouldn't mind a couple more.

Get the CD or MP3s here, on a two-for-one with I'm a Lonesome Fugitive.