Review Summary: "First thing I remember knowin'/was a lonesome whistle blowin'/ and a younguns dream of growing up to ride
Looking back, it’s almost staggering just how much material a popular artist was expected to release in the 60s. Small wonder then, that with labels sometimes expecting a given artist to release multiple albums within a single year, that the overall quality of those albums, regardless of the caliber of the artists releasing them, should often suffer from being treated merely as a collection of songs meant to accompany a hit single. Such might easily have been the case with Merle Haggard, who had already released two albums earlier in 68 before Mama Tried, his eighth LP in three years. The two previous albums were fine in their own right, but even at this early stage of Hags career it was apparent that he was capable of much more. Mama Tried, as his third release of the year, by all rights should have shown Hag’s creativity nearly entirely exhausted, especially given the rigid confines of the Bakersfield sound that had made him famous. Against all expectations, Mama Tried, while maintaining the prison song themes and honky-tonk Bakersfield style that had become a hallmark of his early career, would prove itself to be one of the strongest works of his decades-long career, a clear precursor to the Outlaw movement, and an overall classic of the genre.
Full of honesty and grit, Merle deals with working class issues without ever coming across as patronizing, the great pitfall of songwriters who wax poetic about the American underclass. His music so effectively projects empathy and understanding for the trials and tribulations of the run-down and desperate that if it weren’t for his irascibly conservative views, he could very well have laid greater claim to Woody Guthrie’s legacy as a voice for the downtrodden than Dylan (although what actual blue-collar worker would ever agree that ***ing Bob Dylan speaks for them better than Haggard is beyond me). The autobiographical nature of much of the material clearly lends to its authenticity, Merle drawing from personal experience with both poverty and prison to give world-weary authority to his songs. His time in San Quentin especially influences both his song choices and how he chooses to interpret them. Take for example The Green Green Grass of Home, a bittersweet tragedy in ballad form, a track that Merle’s steely baritone gives an emotional weight that could only come from someone who had actually spent time dreaming about home and family from the confines of a prison yard.
Much has already been made of Merle’s fixation with prison songs, especially at this point in his career. Mama Tried especially would show his strongest examination of the subject, but his prison material exists as just an aspect of the focus he gives to all of life’s hardships, rather than just those relating to incarceration, from poverty to infidelity to alcoholism, all of which had or would visit him at some point in his life. But there’s an undertone of resistance in recounting all this misery, a grim defiance that says that if all of this can be endured, what in life can’t be? Maybe it’s this undercurrent of determination that makes the songs resonate so well, the reflections on hard times and regret that, while often self-pitying, seem to say that life will go on, even when one is cut off from everything that makes life good, even when life is behind bars doing life without parole. Nowhere is this seen better than on the title track.
Mama Tried, the opener of the album and Merle’s third number one hit of the year, is one of those unforgettable moments that can be found in the best of any genre, that electrifying instant when you hear a particular strain of music and know that it’s an instant paradigm of the style it represents. The fingerpicked guitar intro, followed by that bent electric twang is that moment, akin in feeling to that immortal guitar lick on Johnny B. Goode, that feeling that from that point forward, when you think of the words "country" or "rock-n-roll" that those sounds will instantly emblemize those concepts. That the rest of the album struggles slightly to live up to the title track is more a testament to that song’s power than a dig at the rest of the cuts on the record. The album is filled from end to end with solid tracks that, if not paired with the title track, would have been a classic Merle Haggard record in their own right. From the sheepish humor of Little Ol' Wine Drinker Me, to the jaunty love duet Sunny Side of My Life, Merle deals with his subject matter with both warmth and humanity, backed by the eternally solid Strangers, whose electric, shuffling twang give the music the authority needed to support Merle's tales of love, heartbreak and redemption.
The fact that there really aren’t any real failings to Mama Tried as an album only slightly obscures the fact that there would eventually be singers who would come after Haggard and outdo him at his own game. Dolly Parton’s rendition of her own In The Good Old Days, which she wouldn’t record or release until almost a year after Hag’s version, is clearly the stronger of the two, and of course Cash would soon make The Green Green Grass forever a Johnny and June number after the Folsom concert. While from a simple listening standpoint those versions stand above Hag’s renditions, he has the benefit of being able to say that he was actually singing from experience, an authenticity that, paired with powerful songwriting and a fantastic backing band in the form of the Strangers, doesn’t just make the album a great listening experience, but an essential one. And while others have come and made their improvements on much of the material on this album, the title cut will always remain, unmistakably , Merle’s.
