\u201cHaggard didn\u2019t just sing about the life described in country songs,\u201d CNN\u2019s report says. \u201cHe lived it\u201d:<\/p>\n
His father died when Haggard was a child, and he ran away from home and later served time in prison. He drank \u2014 one of his best-known songs is called \u201cI Think I\u2019ll Just Stay Here and Drink\u201d \u2014 and partied. He was married five times.<\/p>\n
Haggard\u2019s song titles were plainspoken and evocative. \u201cI\u2019m a Lonesome Fugitive.\u201d \u201cSing Me Back Home.\u201d \u201cBranded Man.\u201d \u201cThe Bottle Let Me Down.\u201d \u201cIf We Make It Through December.\u201d He may not have written all of his hits, but he sang them with a pure feeling that left no doubt of the pain \u2014 and the joy \u2014 inside.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He wrote and sang some terrific songs, and he collaborated and hung out with some of my favorite artists in the world of country music, but I had a hard time getting past Haggard\u2019s angry right-wing tribalism (whether he meant any of that, or if he was just selling records, isn\u2019t clear, but also doesn\u2019t really matter). He spent too much time and energy drawing lines and peeing on trees to mark his territory for me to ever regard him fondly. He helped spawn the current brand\u00a0of country music that\u2019s about<\/em> being country music \u2014 tribal boundary-keeping that masks the fact that most of it\u2019s just pop-rock sung with a Southern accent.<\/p>\n
Merle Haggard, Oprah Winfrey, and Paul McCartney were honored at the Kennedy Center in 2010. That may be the only possible sentence including those three names.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n So I\u2019ve never quite absorbed whatever it is that made Merle Haggard the favorite right-wing singer of so many progressives<\/a>. The terrific 1990 New Yorker<\/em> profile by Bryan Di Salvatore<\/a> that Erik Loomis links to there discusses a similar frustration:<\/p>\n
It is an unfortunate irony that Merle Haggard, probably the most musically diverse singer in country music, should be inextricably linked with a casual ditty \u2014 a passably catchy tune \u2014 that shifted attention from his musicianship, which is highly articulate, to his politics, which are not. \u2026<\/p>\n
Over the years, Merle\u2019s explanation of the impulse behind \u201cOkie\u201d has varied, and his basic political orientation \u2014 an instinctive right-wing populism \u2014 has found expression as everything from stouthearted flag-waving to the maunderings of a day drinker down at the corner tavern. Merle doesn\u2019t read much. \u2026\u00a0He has also said that his heroes, in addition to his father, are Bob Wills, Joe Louis, Bing Crosby, and Franklin Roosevelt, and that \u201cevolution is a laughing matter for anybody that\u2019s got a rational mind.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It wasn\u2019t just \u201cOkie From Muskogee.\u201d Haggard returned to those hippie-punching, white-patriot themes repeatedly. Again, maybe that was just an attempt to recapture the commercial success of \u201cOkie,\u201d but the effect matters more than the murky motive.<\/p>\n
Last month, David Roberts offered\u00a0a long, smart, insightful and empathetic discussion of \u201cWhite working-class nostalgia, explained by John Wayne<\/a>.\u201d You should read the whole thing. Roberts, I think, does a terrific job of exploring the dreams and desires of the sort of angry white folks who are now rallying behind, of all people, Donald Trump<\/em> and his call to \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d (It parallels much of what I said \u2014 with less patience and sympathy \u2014 here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n
But if you haven\u2019t got time to read the whole thing just now, watch this instead. This is Merle Haggard singing his 1982 song \u201cAre the Good Times Really Over For Good?<\/a>\u201d in 2011:<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Gv61zBZacpo<\/a>\n
Pay attention particularly to where the audience cheers. That\u2019s what Roberts is talking about.<\/p>\n
The real tragedy of that schlocky, tribal anthem, though, is that Merle Haggard was capable of so much else. He could have written a love song \u2014 or a divorce song \u2014 titled \u201cAre the Good Times Really Over for Good?\u201d and it surely would have been as haunting and heartbreaking as the unspoken\u00a0resignation of \u201cIf We Make It Through December.\u201d The man really could sing, when he wanted to.<\/p>\n
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Merle Haggard wrote and sang some terrific songs, and he collaborated and hung out with some of my favorite artists in the world of country music, but I had a hard time getting past his angry right-wing tribalism (whether he meant any of that, or if he was just selling records, isn’t clear, but also doesn’t really matter).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[239,65,240],"class_list":["post-31891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","tag-music","tag-tribalism","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\n
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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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