I'll Also Change Your Flat Tire Merle

My hairy legged guitar picking former preacher, the Right Reverend Dr. Craig Goff, sent me this picture from the Merle Haggard concert he recently attended. Craig said the living legend was in great voice and put on an amazing show. I don’t doubt it and am only sorry I missed it.

What I find amazing about this picture is how Merle looks like one of the Blues Brothers. Jake and Elwood would be proud to have Merle on a ride-a-long. The fact that everyone from Big Brother and the Holding Company to Pure Prairie League is willing to change Merle’s flat tires would be a bonus.

I discovered Merle in about 1967 when “Branded Man” hit the charts. The twanging electric guitar lead bends were somehow cleaner than everyone else I heard on KTSA in San Antonio while working for my brother during the summer on the ranch he managed. It was my first introduction to the Bakersfield Sound. The Next year the Hag contributed what is one of the songs that periodically runs across the weird radio station that is my mind. “Mama Tried” is simply one of the cleanest written country songs of all time in my opinion and comes back to me time and again.

Mama tried to raise me better

But her pleading I denied

That leaves only me to blame

Because Mama tried

Mrs. Haggard was also the subject of another nearly close to perfectly written Haggard song. “Mama’s Hungry Eyes”. The lyrics are as hard-hitting as “Mama Tried” but the instrumentation and Merle’s voice speak volumes in capturing the lonely life of Merle’s mother, who saw a home in Oklahoma burn and moved to the California promised land only to have to move into a converted boxcar.

Merle’s misspent youth has been well documented and culminated in his being a guest in San Quentin prison at 20. Thankfully for the music world he didn’t “turn 21 in prison doing life without parole,” but he did get to see Johnny Cash make his “Live at San Quentin” album as a member of the audience.

Merle has countless hits, but probably the two most classic of his body of work are “Silver Wings” and “Today I Started Loving You Today”. Those two probably both make the Top 10 of greatest country songs of all time. I always wondered if George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was about the same poor ole lovesick boy who had to die to get over the girl who broke his heart.

The most amazing thing about Merle Haggard in my mind is how he taught himself to play the fiddle in a very short time in order to play on his tribute album to his own hero, Bob Wills. The fact he played fiddle on a tribute album to a fiddler is also remarkable and pushed the envelope.

All this thought about Merle Haggard made me really sorry I wasn’t able to make the concert. I went out to YouTube to see if there were any clips from the concert and I found a really fun one I’ll share.

It’s a song that’s not a classic, “Workin’ in Tennessee”. It’s a song about the time Merle lived in Nashville on Old Hickory Lake and nothing much productive happened in that year. The best thing about the clip is Merle tells a good story about being invited to Johnny & June Cash’s house to help make “some phonograph records”.

When Johnny & Merle were together in San Quentin the two men couldn’t have been further apart, Johnny up on stage and Merle just an anonymous face in the crowd. The fact years later they ended up neighbors in Nashville says something about the redemption of Merle Haggard’s life.

I guess Mama Haggard’s trying paid off and the world is the better for her perseverance.