Merle is gone and I don't feel so well myself

Last Wednesday afternoon, my wife, Carissa, texted me the news that Merle Haggard had died. It’s not like you couldn’t see that one coming. He was 79 and there is ample evidence that he lived out many of the sad songs that he wrote and performed. As much as we may not like to admit it, there really is a limit to how much whiskey and cigarettes a body can absorb (unless you are Willie Nelson or Keith Richards, although perhaps the type of cigarettes you smoke make a difference). 

  

So the news wasn’t a surprise. But I was surprised that the news left me in a fuzzy haze of nostalgia. Which I hated, because nostalgia too often is one of those self-indulgent emotions that should not be trusted.  Nostalgia is what makes us fondly remember the good old days when in fact the good old days were not good because everyone smoked, kids ate lead paint chips, racist jokes and bigotry went uncontested, “batting average” and “RBI” were common metrics relied upon to measure baseball performance, we didn’t have the internet, and you couldn’t pay $10 for a six-pack of artisanal beer. We didn’t even have selfie sticks. Get in the way-back machine if ya’ll want, but I’m staying here in the 21^st Century.

When I read Carissa’s message, I was sitting at my desk at work in front of a double-monitored computer display editing an environmental assessment/finding of no significant impact (in NEPA-speak, an EA/FONSI). Some might call me a hero, but I’m just a regular guy trying to make a living. At that moment, a sad regular guy in his office in the middle of Washington, D.C., a few blocks away from the White House, contemplating the death of one of his musical heroes. And then Merle’s Big City penetrated my subconscious. Big City is a song about a guy stuck living in a city because of the necessities of making a living while he dreams of leaving it all behind and heading for Montana. I’ve always loved that song. No (emotionally crippling) regrets about leaving Idaho for D.C., but Big City has elbowed its way into my subconscious more than once .while navigating traffic.

Like I said, my instinct is to resist the impulse to wallow in nostalgia. But for Merle I make an exception. Some of my earliest recollections involve listing to Merle, who was my hard-drinking construction-worker father’s favorite country artist. And by “favorite country artist” I mean “favorite artist” since that was the only genre of music acceptable in the Miller household in those days. This was the early 1970s and in our house there were no Beatles, Stones, Dylan, or Elvis. It was Merle, Johnny, Hank, Bob Wills, and the like – but mostly Merle. My mother recently said that when my dad moved out of the house before the divorce, he was more concerned with packing his Merle Haggard albums than his clothes. That sounds about right to me. I remember times as a kid when he was a few beers into an evening, he would sing Merle songs to me and my brothers. He wasn’t Merle, but he wasn’t all bad. I can still hear him singing Today I Started Loving Her Again and Silver Wings from those times.

As I became a teen, ventured off to college, and developed my own musical aesthetic, I never strayed far from Merle and other artist from the three-chords-and-the-truth school of poetry. It just hits close to home for me. I have no talent for singing (although after a whiskey or two or three, I’m really not too bad, I’m pretty sure), but to this day I know the words to all the Merle Haggard standards: Workin’ Man Blues,  Mama Tried, If We Make it Through December, Think I’ll Just Stay Her and Drink, If We’re Not Back in Love by Monday, I take a Lot of Pride (in What I Am), Farmer’s Daughter, White Line Fever, The Running Kind, The Bottle Let Me Down, Carolyn, Misery and Gin – that’s not a complete list and I may need a refresher on some of the lyrics, but every one of these songs evokes family and friends, times and places.  

If you’re not familiar with Merle Haggard beyond his redneck anthem Okie from Muskogee (a classic that is not one of his autobiographical songwriting exercises) his family moved from Oklahoma to California to escape the Dust Bowl and search for opportunity. His father died young. He was in trouble at school at later in trouble with the law. He spent a few years in the notorious San Quentin prison for attempted burglary. All of this became fodder for his songs. If you want to understand the Dust Bowl, read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and listen to Merle. This is from Tulare Dust, a song Haggard wrote and released early in his career about life in the California cotton fields:

Tulare dust in a farm boy's nose
Wonderin' where the freight train goes
Standin' in a field by the railroad track
Cursin' this strap on my cotton sack

I can see Mom and Dad with shoulders low
Both of 'em pickin' on a double row
They do it for a livin' because they must
That's life like it is in the Tulare dust

And I miss Oklahoma but I'll stay if I must
And help make a livin' in the Tulare dust

He didn’t finish high school, but Merle captured the essence of the rural poor and working class in ways others could not. He couldn’t get air time in today’s country music market, where the focus centers on good times and glosses over the struggles of the rural working class. That’s not Merle Haggard’s kind of music. Thank God.

RIP Merle Haggard.