Written a few years back. This is its first public post. It will follow a chapter on the Bobby Fuller Four in my proposed book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1).
An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. In tribute to what's lost, it's this record's turn today.
Written by Merle Haggard
Produced by Ken Nelson
Single, Capitol Records, 1968
One of the rules of the road is that the driver controls the radio. My brother Art was driving. That meant the radio would be playing country music.
It was 2004. My brother Rob had driven from his home in Albany to meet up with me in Syracuse. I took the wheel of my car (and my radio) to drive us from Syracuse to Columbus, where Art lived. From there, the three of us traveled in Art's car. Contemporary country music provided the soundtrack for our final trip to Missouri.
It wasn't our first trip. We'd been there individually and collectively many, many times over the years. Our mom was born in Southwestern Missouri, and our grandparents had remained there. Art and Rob are older than me, so most of their family visits to the Show Me State occurred before I came along. By the mid-sixties, summer trips to Missouri involved just me, my sister Denise, and Mom, with Dad remaining in Syracuse. Within a few years, it was just Mom and I making that trek, as Dad and all of the older siblings had responsibilities elsewhere. The whole family went to Missouri for Christmas in 1970. It's the only time I remember all of us being there.
In 2004, Mom and Dad were already in Missouri as Art, Rob, and I made our way West. Denise had moved to England, too far away to accompany us. Grampa had passed away years before. And now Grandma was gone as well. My brothers and I would be pall bearers. Country music played on the radio. The driver controls the radio.
I hate country music. Sometimes I'm lying (or at least kidding myself) when I say that, and sometimes it's the truth. Three chords and the truth. You'd think a love of country and western would be an innate characteristic of a boy whose mother hailed from the buckle of the Bible belt. 'Tain't so. Art and Rob love country music. Denise and I do not.
It wasn't always like that. As a kid, one of my very favorite records was Ben Colder's "Ring Of Smoke," a broad parody of the Johnny Cash hit "Ring Of Fire." Denise says my incessant playing and re-playing of that MGM Records 45 knocked the country right out of her. I loved it. As a kid in the sixties, I wasn't yet aware of genres, of musical boundaries, of virtual barbed wire fences that suggested if you worked that land and played that music you weren't allowed to trespass on this land and play this music. It was all pop music. You heard it on the radio. The driver controls the radio, but the radio drives us all.
When did it change for me? I used to watch Hee Haw on TV, engaged by the cute country girls, the corny banter, and Archie Campbell's weekly rendition of "PFFT! You Were Gone." Country remained a part of Top 40 radio, so my essential seventies AM atmosphere included Lynn Anderson, Charlie Rich, Donna Fargo, Conway Twitty. My memory may be clouded, but I think I was okay with country music.
Until I wasn't.
What happened? I guess it was some weird combination of introspection, self-image, peer pressure, alienation, and teen reinvention. Being called "farmer" was a popular insult at school, and while I only recall hearing it directed at me when I wore Grampa's hand-me-down overalls, I was aware of its toxic condescension. Country wasn't cool. Neither was I, but while I learned to dig in my heels and stand ground on behalf of comic books and pop music and other things I loved that others mocked, I had also come to think of country as uncool. I wanted to be urbane, witty, sophisticated, fast-paced, and elite, city-slicker rather than shitkicker. New York City, not Nashville or Bakersfield. And, in the post-Watergate world, I had no use for country's jingoism. By the time I fell for punk rock, twang was in my rear-view mirror. Country music? I met another and PFFT! it was gone.
It took a long time for me to appreciate country music again. I knew of rock 'n' roll's roots in country, so I was always okay with the Everly Brothers, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, King Elvis I. I knew the Beatles' "All My Loving" was a straight-up country song, and I loved it anyway. In the early eighties, I thought Juice Newton's cover of the Dave Edmunds track "Queen Of Hearts" was the best thing on AM radio. By the end of the eighties, a local Syracuse group called the Delta Rays (led by Craig Marshall and Maura Boudreau, the latter now Maura Kennedy of the fabulous Kennedys, with her husband Pete Kennedy) pried my closed mind wide open to Patsy Cline and George Jones, and to Mary-Chapin Carpenter. In the early nineties, I became a regular viewer of a Saturday night video program on CMT that showcased rockin' country. Nanci Griffith. Rosie Flores. The Sky Kings. The Mavericks. Joe Diffie. Jo Dee Messina. This was country music I could support.
For all that, I still can’t listen to country radio. Nails on a chalkboard. When I'm driving, my control of the radio spins the dial elsewhere.
My work as a pop journalist (and my quest for deliverance as a music fan) reminded me of the appeal of classic country, and my respect for that grew by leaps and bounds. Welcome back to my world, Johnny Cash. Hee-Haw and howdy, Buck Owens! And hello, Merle Haggard.
Haggard had always been outside of my realm. I associated him with "Okie From Muskogee," a track I considered a put-down of hippies and peaceniks, a song that seemed the very epitome of the redneck POV I so detested. Years later, I read that Haggard himself claimed an evolving, shifting view of the song, at times cashing it in at face value, at other times thinking of it as a joke or parody, a wink rather than a sneer. Some have suggested the song was meant to provide the counterbalance of a conservative viewpoint in the face of liberal protest. I dunno. I mean, even though he wasn't really an Okie--his parents moved from Checotah, OK to California before Merle was born in 1937--it's likely Haggard mighta smoked some marijuana in or around Muskogee at some point or another, his lyrical claim to the contrary notwithstanding.
In fact, at the time of his early success in country music from 1966 through '68, Haggard hid a skeleton in his closet: he had fought the law, and the law had won. Teen stints in juvenile detention centers gave way to a robbery conviction in 1957, landing him in Bakersfield Jail. A failed attempt to escape there moved him to San Quentin in 1958. He turned twenty-one in prison. It may have appeared likely he'd die there, too.
But Haggard rewrote his script. Seeing Johnny Cash perform at San Quentin prompted Haggard to play in a country band at the prison. He saw the dead-end roads stretched in nearly all directions around him. One road held the possibility of getting through: the straight and narrow. Haggard was paroled in 1960. He would never be a convict again.
Even the straightest and narrowest of roads may suffer detours, eventual twists and turns. Tolls. As Haggard played, recorded, and began to have hits, he worried that his past would kill his future, that public revelation of his time behind bars could terminate his time in the spotlight. Johnny Cash convinced Haggard to confront the issue. The driver controls the radio, and the narrative. During a 1969 appearance on Cash's TV show, Haggard spoke publicly about seeing Cash in concert at San Quentin, when Merle was an inmate. Haggard's career did not suffer. He was on his way to becoming a legend of country music.
Suddenly, Haggard's 1968 hit "Mama Tried" gained an additional patina of authenticity. It wasn't quite autobiographical--he'd committed robbery, not murder, and wasn't serving life without parole--but the feel was there, the gravitas, the sense of truth. Three chords and the truth.
Turning twenty-one in prison, leaving only himself to blame, because Mama tried, Mama tried. It's the equal of Dylan, insightful and honest, heartbreaking, real. Country music. The music I disavowed as a teenager, the music I claimed to hate. I guess that leaves only me to blame.
My brothers and I arrived at my grandparents' house in Aurora in 2004. Our parents were there, along with aunts and uncles--including Mom's siblings, about to bid farewell to their own mother--and a representative sample of our cousins from California and Florida. Art and Rob brought fast food from the Starlite Drive-In, including orders of chicken gizzards and chicken livers. We all ate together, talked, laughed, and celebrated a life well-lived. The next morning, with our duties discharged and the funeral concluded, my brothers and I left the cemetery, the car now pointed East. The road awaited us. We were leaving Missouri behind, probably for the last time.
Our thoughts were our own, the memories established and permanent. Country music played on the radio. On a freight train leavin' town, never knowing where I'm bound.
The radio didn't play any Merle Haggard on that trip. It's okay. The driver controls the radio. That's the rule. I learned rules as a kid in New York, and in Missouri. I learned to swim in Missouri. I learned to drive in New York. I learned about music everywhere. I still have so much more to learn.
--
Godspeed, Art.
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