BWW Reviews: MERLE HAGGARD: THE RUNNING KIND Does the Legend Justice

Sometimes, it's nice to be reminded that rules have exceptions.

Normally, the blend of biography, history, critical essay and cultural analysis that David Cantwell is after in Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, comes with a certain amount of over-reach and hyperbole built into the design.

There's none of that here.

Granted, Haggard's life, legend and music--inextricable in Cantwell's account, though not necessarily in the ways the common narrative has tended to suggest--make for unusually fertile ground. But a lot of good writers could have written productively about Haggard without cutting anywhere near as close to the bone.

Cantwell's advantage is that he hasn't just listened to the legend's music but lived with it--taken, that is, the kind of deep-connection journey that a writer only gets to take with one or two singers in a lifetime.

In this case, we're the beneficiaries.

One of the main dangers of such a close connection is of losing perspective--of claiming either too much or too little for someone who is, after all, a country singer, however legendary.

The best way to avoid that danger with an artist--a test even the most estimable critics routinely fail--is to know where the artist fits (rare enough) and then to never lose sight of either your subject or the bigger picture (almost unheard of).

Cantwell knows where Haggard fits. And he never forgets.

What we get, as a reward for his diligence, is sharp writing consistently illuminating even sharper analysis that is not limited to Haggard, his career, or even Country music generally.

One minute Richard Nixon is the man spoke to a white working class who wondered "...who spoke for them? Who even remembered them?" and who "determined that he would. Or, closer to true, he would make sure they felt remembered."

Another minute (which might or might not be the next, but is always rightly judged) Ernest Tubb is "that old Country Crosby" (as in Bing, whose vast, oft-forgotten, influence Cantwell has, by then, already woven into Haggard's own story, and Country's) and legendary session guitarist James Burton is a man who has "spent his career blurring the blurry-to-begin-with lines between blues, rock 'n' roll, and country, and then refocusing the lines into hits."

A President, a Country giant, a session guitarist, each summed up in a line that can't be bettered, for either concision or insight, and that any good writer will wish they had written.

He does the same thing for Nudie suits, "hard-edged" Bakersfield vs. "soft-centered" Nashville ("All true, but all exaggerated."), the influence of Chet Atkins on surf music and much, much more.

And that's before you get to larger concepts that are both undeniably true and far too rarely acknowledged, like "the Great American Songbook, Nashville edition" or Black America having a "culture of improvisational resilience." Or the writer reaching out to embrace an American tapestry grand enough to include John Ford and Woody Guthrie, Kent State and the Southern Strategy, the Wizard of Oz and Ronald Reagan, Dirty Harry and Easy Rider, Bob Dylan and Grandmaster Flash, "Bonnie and Clyde" as anti-establishment heroes (in the famous late-sixties' film version) or as murderers and thieves deserving of their fate (in Haggard's own, more plaintive, version, perhaps the more powerful because he loved the film)--all of which (and more) serve to give Haggard his distinctive voice and shape even as he returns the favor.

Cantwell does this on page after page, with characters (and ideas) large and small.

All without ever forgetting--or letting us forget--that it is Haggard's own story he is here to tell us.

He hasn't just listened to his subject, then, or even just lived with him. He's learned a thing or two about conveying weight without pretense from the man who once described his own rise to stardom as "a twenty-year bus ride."

Nothing less would have sufficed for a book dedicated to understanding how dope-smoking, oft-married, outlaw-running "Hag"-incorrigible teenage runaway, ex-convict, professional contrarian-became not just a Country music superstar, but the Right's idea of the Voice of the Common Man, and, often-as-not at one and the same time, the Left's idea of roots-of-my-raising integrity.

Certainly, much of Haggard's utterly unique position, in both Country and the world at large, rests on those roots, a cultural and familial background Cantwell weaves deftly into the history of the "country diaspora" of working class whites who moved west from the South, and, of course, the Dust Bowl (the book is particularly good on the migration of the Okies and the ways in which the Haggard family was both typical and atypical) even as the "blues diaspora" of Southern working class blacks was moving north with social, economic and political ramifications that are still very much with us.

While Haggard's long-time friend and Bakersfield rival, Buck Owens, had the far more common journey--the Haggards had it tough, to be sure, but they were at least within shouting distance of middle-class respectability--it only proved that no journey was really typical:

"An eight-year-old Owens and his parents had headed to California from Texas in 1937, the year Haggard was born, but their car only lasted to Arizona, adding a decade-and-a-half layover to Buck's itinerary."

Entire books have been written without saying anything more of real significance about the depth and persistence of American aspiration, but Cantwell doesn't leave it there. He goes deep into the ways the Haggards stood out (they lived in a box car when others were living in tents) without quite breaking free.

And it's here--in the rise and fall of working class expectations and realities from the Depression to post-war optimism to Sixties-era backlash and lingering, sometimes reactionary, uncertainty--that he finds the essence of Haggard's ability to straddle contradictions, the qualities that made him the perfect man to have what Cantwell calls his "Muskogee Moment."

That late-Sixties, early-Seventies era--encapsulated but hardly defined by Haggard's most famous song, "Okie from Muskogee"--was fraught with irony, but not of the cheap and simple kind.

However many times the line, "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," drew rousing, even blood-curdling cheers from conservative audiences who, in point of fact--as history has shown and Cantwell does not hesitate to remind us--had much to fear and much to lose from the cultural and economic cataclysms sweeping the country around them, it didn't keep Haggard himself from smoking as much dope as any self-respecting hippie...or from musing about it.

The book's recounting of the song's birth (in a line uttered on Haggard's touring bus--whether by the head-liner or someone else, nobody really remembers--as the bus passed a road sign in Oklahoma, a line that struck everyone as "pretty damn funny...Presumably, because, at that very moment, a joint was being passed."), is typical of the author's keen grasp of his subject's Place and his awareness of same.

The tale of the song's conception, recording, and wild, improbably intense reception as it was rolled out first in concert, then on record, then in a series of recorded concerts, winds through a Tale of the Times, beginning with the country's bitter division over the Viet Nam war:

"Increasingly, there were mainstream Americans who hated the war but were repulsed by the war-protesting counterculture....As much as anything it was a fight between wildly differing conceptions of what it meant, as Haggard put it, to live right and be free." (To which I can only add that it would be nice if we got that kind of trenchant political analysis in books about politics.)

Then, moving on to purely musical contradictions:

"If anything, the 'Okie From Muskogee' single sounds like a Folk Revival leftover. Heard today, it's hard to believe such a gentle, delicate record could've pissed off anybody, but it did. No way does it sound like it could empower anyone. But it did."

And finally, after a series of penetrating, finely-crafted arguments, anecdotes, insights, questions and questions-that-lay-behind-deceptively-easy-answers that take us through the entire era, the journey beyond (embracing everything from the irony of Reagan-era nostalgia helping push Haggard's style of iconoclasm to the margins even though the era's biggest new star, George Strait, was as indebted to Haggard as Haggard was to Lefty Frizzell; to the subsequent rise of left-leaning Alt-Country; to the identity split that took place in mainstream country music during the nineties as the working class audience increasingly bought records reflecting middle-class comfort and assuarance while hip college kids sought out the very kind of "roots" music which Haggard himself had come, rather bemusedly, to embody) and Haggard's own shifting, sometimes acute, sometimes confusing public statements about the whole fuss, to a kind of resolution:

"Was that damn song meant to be sung with your tongue in your cheek or with your hand over your heart? Yes."

I think that pretty much sums up the state of the modern Culture War, which was gathering force and being shaped in broad outline during the Muskogee Moment itself, and it's typical of the book's bracing style of cultural and historical engagement that it clinches Merle Haggard's place in all this without letting his faults, or those of his audience, slide (Cantwell's account of being physically threatened by fellow fans at a 1990, Gulf War-era concert when he refused to stand for Haggard's bathetic "Me and Crippled Soldiers" is genuinely chilling and thoroughly disheartening, not least because it acknowledges--and conveys, to anyone who has ever felt alone in a crowd, and doubly so to those who share the author's experience of having been made to feel less alone on more than a few occasions by Haggard himself--the real power that a song the author felt was both fake and god-awful had on that particular night and the sense of isolation it created in the loner even as it clearly empowered so many others).

This book, then, never takes the easy way out.

But, for all his impressive reach, sometimes scholarly, sometimes intuitive, frequently (and seamlessly) both, Cantwell is, thankfully, never less than knowing about the music--and never fails to bring us back to it.

For starters, he avoids the "writer"--or more accurately "singer/songwriter"--fetish that tends to consume even the sharpest post-Beatles' critics.

He understands, in other words (and lets us know that Haggard played a significant role in this understanding), that singing is as much an art form as putting words to paper or humming a melody into a recording device. This is especially important in Haggard's case because, with this most "autobiographical" of country artists, working in a time, place and genre where personal "authenticity" was considered the very stamp of moral authority, many of the records that built his legend were written by others and even those he wrote himself tended to be rooted in personal experience but not limited by it.

In Haggard's search for a kind of restless peace, a search "for his heart's desire," what he found, "and right in his own backyard, too, was a freight train leaving town." In other words, a testier, knottier style of contradiction than mere words could hope to contain.

So, when it came to a staggering, decades-long catalog of nearly peerless quality, what sold it, autobiographical or not, was the Voice.

"That's pure Merle," Cantwell tell us, after citing a particularly appropo, surely-must-have-come-from-Merle's-own-life line, "but the words and music are courtesy of Dolly Parton."

Or, "when 'old Hag,'...visits a 'psychoed-out psychologist' in 'Heaven Was a Drink of Wine,' he's doing it in a song written by Sanger Shafer."

Feats, incidentally, that Haggard could pull off because of his vocal mastery. Because, for instance, he might deliver a song--whether his own or someone else's--after a manner which "even though it's about being caged in a body controlled by another, it still somehow outswings Frank Sinatra." Or might get so far inside a standard like "I Started Loving You Again,"--a 1968 B-side, the journey of which Cantwell does a typically fine job of tracking through layers of personal (this is one Haggard, who tended to stay friends with his ex-wives, did write) and extra-personal meaning (it's been covered countless times, often brilliantly)--that the author can only conclude: "Listen to Merle do it, and you'll wonder how anyone ever had the guts to sing it again."

Of course, Haggard is a great songwriter--equally at home observing himself, his legend, or the lives of others.

He's finally--and not so simply--a great American artist and it's in driving this point home, one nail at a time, that Cantwell builds a house much like Haggard's own. One made to last--or, if you prefer, a railroad track fit for Merle Haggard to ride in and out of town on.

"Switch out that Dobro for a slide," he says of Haggard's 1969 Jimmie Rodgers tribute Same Train, a Different Time, "and you've got the basic template for a bulk of the tracks on the Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet, out only a few months prior."

That's among a legion of telling insights about the intertwining nature of "country" and "rock."

But, for me at least (and it's one measure of just how good The Running Kind is that each reader is likely to find different things to value most), the book reaches its emotional peak when Cantwell lets his own imagination take hold.

To read him on the not-so-far-fetched possibility of alternative universe where oldies' stations play Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay" next to Haggards "Sing Me Back Home," or on hearing 1971's Hag as a "conversation with Marvin Gaye's What's Going On from the same year" is to ache for the country that might have been--the country that seems ever so much further out of reach now than it did in the Muskogee Moment, when our divisions and contradictions were out in the open.

Those are assessments that strike home with me, and deeply. But, even on the rare occasions when I wasn't fully in accord with Cantwell's judgments--I hear more regret in Hag's "Mama Tried" than he does, for instance, and more angst behind Buck Owens' big smile--the book does what great criticism should do.

I might hold onto my opinions, but I'll be listening with new ears to songs I've heard hundreds of times.

The popular music of the last century is probably going to stand as America's great cultural achievement, unique in its ability to most fully represent us to the world, posterity and, finally, ourselves. That music was brought to us by thousands of moments of fleeting genius, caught, often a fleeting moment at at time, by literally thousands of musicians. Among the few dozen geniuses who set the boundaries by chasing and catching those moments over and over, the vast majority have never received any testament commensurate with their achievement.

Thanks to The Running Kind, Merle Haggard can be added to the list of the select few who have.

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