In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Merle Haggard: The Running Kind by David Cantwell
  • Mark Hulsether
MERLE HAGGARD: The Running Kind. By David Cantwell. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2013.

This book is rewarding although atypical for a university press. It has no scholarly apparatus besides a selected discography, and for sources it relies on Haggard’s autobiographies, magazine profiles, and Cantwell’s lifetime of listening. Although Cantwell has substantial insider knowledge including interviews with Haggard, this is not footnoted. He disavows any intent to produce a biography—although the outline of a de facto version is implicit—and opts instead for “strong-minded criticism” that moves through Haggard’s records reflecting on how they relate to Haggard’s career, the music industry, and changes in U.S. culture (7). Cantwell occasionally evokes scholars (e.g. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, Craig Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come, and works of Bill Malone)—thus hinting that his reflections emerge from a solid bibliography—but explicit evocations are few and far between.

Within these limits the book has many virtues. Cantwell shows how Haggard’s family (his parents were “Okie” migrants and his father died when he was nine) and life story (he dropped out of high school and served time in San Quentin prison) shape his sensibilities and meanings as a cultural icon. Cantwell provides a window into the Bakersfield music scene and thoughtful interpretation of Haggard’s influences. These include not only usual suspects like Lefty Frizzell, Jimmy Rodgers, and people from the Bakersfield scene (including band member Roy Nichols and spouse Bonnie Owens who was earlier married to Buck Owens), but also crooners like Bing Crosby.

In 1969 Haggard’s career—already rising through hits like “Mama Tried”—exploded as “Okie from Muskogee” became a cultural phenomenon and earned him an invitation to Nixon’s White House. “Okie” has ample irony to give it indeterminate meanings; Haggard supposedly wrote it while stoned, and the Grateful Dead performed it at Woodstock. However, his follow-up, “Fightin’ Side of Me,” was far more strident, and Haggard’s populist sensibilities and defense of working folks’ dignity—a constant from his early career to later years when he sang a Woody Guthrie anthem in a Michael Moore film—were drawn into the orbit of right-wing populism.

Haggard nearly released “Irma Jackson”—featuring a white protagonist’s devotion to an African-American lover—as his follow-up to “Okie.” However, under industry pressure he downplayed it, mirroring in real life his lyrics’ fatalism about overcoming racist barriers. Cantwell believes that at this crossroads Haggard could have become a crossover (not solely country) star in the territory shared by country, [End Page 130] folk, and rock, alongside people like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. He notes how Cash became an icon for alt-country when it rejected the pop sounds and suburban ethos of “Hot New Country.” Haggard, too, flirted with alt-country, but with less success—not least due to pumping out inferior retreads on “Fightin’ Side,” such as one in which only Haggard and “crippled soldiers” still “give a damn” about the US flag. Despite alt-country’s rebellious self-image, its audience was upscale compared to Haggard’s; Cantwell suggests that Haggard’s personal scars better matched the downscale.

Cantwell clearly valorizes Haggard. True, he notes blemishes such as Haggard’s succession of wives (including Bonnie Owens and Leona Williams, both of whom reaped mixed career benefits and suffered from his infidelities) and he flags political alliances and ideas that will seem less than exemplary to many readers of this review. He lingers on records likely to interest only fans, and often enthuses about musical passages that seem workmanlike at best. In his judgment, the 1971 Hag album merits comparison with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On and Haggard’s song “Big City” articulates working class protest “no less [than] Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska” (222). Again, “Haggard’s writing [around 1970] was as smart in its way as Dylan’s … or Lennon and McCartney’s, his singing as powerful as Aretha Franklin’s”—with James Brown as his “only peer…[in] producing such...

pdf

Share