Merle Haggard
Down Every Road: 1962-1994

Down Every Road attempts successfully to deal with the uneven yet often brilliant career of one of country music’s most compelling and significant figures, Merle Haggard. It includes four compact discs and a marvelous, well written and well illustrated 76 page booklet. The project extends beyond his classic years with Capitol to include early Tally singles and his latter day work for MCA and Epic. One might suggest that "Hag in Box" contains too broad an overview of his career.

That’s because for about five years, basically the second half of the 1960s, Haggard enjoyed arguably the finest run of any country singer and songwriter. With songs rich in detail and tied to specifics, Haggard the writer and sometimes the cover artist created a remarkable canon of material that thus addressed universal themes associated with the genre. And he did it as well or better than anybody before or since. He seemed to tell his own story, and thus others’ stories, in his songs; and to a large degree he did exactly that. Across the first two discs they spread, monster cut after monster cut – "Swinging Doors," "The Bottle Let Me Down," "Somebody Told My Story," "Branded Man," "Somewhere Between," "Sing Me Back Home," "Mama Tried," "I Take A Lot of Pride In What I Am," "Hungry Eyes," and "California Cottonfields." Down Every Road also contains a wealth of strong album tracks, from an era when only Haggard among country artists was recording worthwhile album tracks. An occasional weaker outings finds its way here, such as "The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde," the A side of the magnificent "I Started Loving You Again."

Haggard possessed at his peak the astonishing ability to find material by other writers, such as Liz ("The Fugitive") Anderson and Tommy ("High On A Hilltop") Collins that fit with his own compositions and advanced his emerging public image. In less than a decade Haggard progressed from literal outlaw to symbolic national outlaw using his recordings as a bully pulpit. Themes of alienation and loneliness ran deep through his work and resonated with an audience during the unsettled 1960s and early 1970s. Eventually Haggard pushed from the highly personal themes to the anthemic and thus less compelling songs of his greatest popularity – "Okie From Muskogee" and "Fighting Side of Me."

After entering the realm of mass popular appeal far outstripping country music, Haggard the artist less frequently demonstrated the qualities that got him to the top. He definitely appeared uncomfortable thrust in the role of "the Spiro Agnew of music," and reacted with excellent tribute albums to Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills, a couple of quickly buried left leaning songs rescued here, and a pair of quick live albums exploiting the two big hits. Even as the Capitol period winds down on disc three, Haggard continued to release some great songs such as "Tulare Dust," "Someday We’ll Look Back," "It’s Not Love But It’s Not Bad," and the incomparable "If We Make It Through December." Yet we also see The Hag turning toward the fun, but ultimately insubstantial, making whoopie hits like "Living With The Shades Pulled Down."

The fourth and final disc of Down Every Road covers the entire period since 1976, eighteen of the 33 years encompassed by the set. From MCA and Epic, only one cut postdates 1986. It contains a few genuine classics. "Big City" and "Ramblin’ Fever" prove as strong as any song the Hag has ever waxed. The duet with Willie Nelson on Townes Van Zandt’s "Pancho and Lefty" captivates still.

Mostly, however, the fourth disc argues strongly that Down Every Road, an excellent four CD set, could have been a mind blowing three disc box with one powerhouse cut after another. So be it. Down Every Road celebrates the creation of one of the all-time giants of country music, an artist who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and Bill Monroe.

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