Reality Check

What I’m trying to do with this new record is cut straight to the recorder like they did in the old days with no manipulation in between. You got to do it ’til you get it right. And we’re not tuning things up with some sort of mechanism. If there’s a glitch, if there’s room noise, we’re leaving it in there. Dammit, that’s part of it! It’s called the truth, is what it is. It’s called reality, and we can’t improve on it. That’s what I’m trying to bring back to the forefront: reality.”

This is Merle Haggard explaining the intent of his next album, Roots, Vol. 1.

Haggard wants the disc, due in stores November 6, to stand as both a challenge and an object lesson to the noisy, soulless music played on today’s country radio. “It’s all become just background music for bad videos,” he claims, typically overstating the case, but just barely. Country music has been Haggard’s life — you could even say it saved his life, because he only turned to music full-time after a three-year stint in San Quentin — and he discusses its past, present and future with all the love and anger of a prophet. As he recently told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I am the art form; the art form is me.”

On Roots, Haggard makes his points by honoring the country-and-western records he first fell in love with as a working-class California kid halfway through the last century. “I’m looking back on my life,” he explains, “and the music I used before I had music of my own.” Roots includes a pair of Hank Thompson covers (“‘I’ll Sign My Heart Away’ is the first song I learned to play barre Chord A on,” Haggard says.), as well as a few Hank Williams songs. Mostly, though, Roots is a tribute to the singing and songwriting of Haggard’s greatest influence, Lefty Frizzell.

“He remained my hero all my life and still is,” Haggard says. “The second time I went to see him in Bakersfield [in 1953] I was sixteen years old, and he got me up to sing! But it must’ve been ten years before I saw him again.” This was because Frizzell spent the latter half of the ’50s mired in one of his career’s many downward slides, and because these were the years when Haggard was doing time for burglary. But after his release, he quickly struck up a friendship with his idol.

“He recognized me right off,” Haggard recalls. “He said, ‘You’re that kid from Bakersfield.’ When he went down in the business was sort of the up period for me, and so when he came back for his last records in the ’70s, there was a lot of Haggard influence on him. It was a strange sort of thing we had going on.

“When he was around [Frizzell died in 1975], every time I’d go to Nashville I tried to get a hold of Lefty, and six or eight of us would sit around a room showing off our latest songs,” Haggard continues. “Lefty’s mother and father lived in California for a long time in the ’70s, too, and one time Lefty called me up and asked if he could bring his family by. I said, ‘Hell, yes. Mom and Dad from [Frizzell’s 1951 hit] “Mom and Dad’s Waltz” can come to my house anytime.’ His mother said to me, ‘When I heard you sing, I said, “Why, that’s Sonny.” And they said to me, “No, Mom, that’s not Sonny, that’s Merle Haggard.”‘”

It’s an easy mistake to make. Listen to Haggard’s new versions of Frizzell masterpieces such as “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” or “Look What Thoughts Will Do,” and the similarities are almost uncanny: The singers share a mournful tone and a lightness with melody, and they each use melisma both to nail down the beat and to play with it (they swing, in other words), as well as to convey emotions for which words are insufficient. Haggard’s voice is stronger and fuller than Frizzell’s, even as he approaches his 65th birthday. Consequently, he’s always been a more versatile vocalist. After all, it’s on populist numbers such as “Working Man Blues,” “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” and the infamously complex “Okie From Muskogee” — where Haggard comes off as not only gentle and playful but fierce and defiant, snarling even — that he found the unique mixture of style and vision that made him much more than an exceptionally gifted Frizzell imitator.

Still, he’s never sounded more like Frizzell than he does on Roots. For one thing, his new fiddle and steel-guitar-driven performances, all captured on vintage equipment in Merle’s living room, are designed to sound like the classics Frizzell cut in Jim Beck’s Dallas studio a half century ago. For another, several tracks include the easy, jazzy picking of Norm Stephens — Frizzell’s original guitarist, Haggard’s own chief inspiration as a picker and the man who Haggard only recently discovered has lived a half hour from his house for the last twenty years.

Haggard has honored his influences before, but this old-school tack is a new approach for him. When, for example, he recorded his 1969 Jimmie Rodgers tribute Same Train, Different Time, he made sure the Singing Brakeman’s Depression-era songs sounded up-to-date. More to the point, virtually all of Haggard’s most famous singles would’ve been impossible without the overdubbing of producer Ken Nelson. Haggard’s current devotion to antiquated recording techniques, in other words, feels oddly reactionary, particularly coming from an artist who helped create modern country music and who now records for Anti, an offshoot of the punk label Epitaph.

What sets Haggard’s retro move apart from alternative country acts working similar territory is simple quality: When Haggard sings and writes in a five-decade-old style, his vocals and songs are every bit as good as the models he’s pushing — a standard that Wayne Hancock and Big Sandy can’t reach. And what makes Roots more than just an old man’s nostalgia is the wisdom it imparts about the importance of hard-won tenderness, melody, groove and human distinctiveness. It’s no coincidence that the cover for Roots — Haggard posed in front of a fireplace surrounded by his favorite old records — so obviously echoes Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home.

“I’m trying to share all I know about country music,” Haggard says. “And one thing I know is that I am a fan of trying to be different instead of all this sameness we’ve got going on in country music. I can’t tell which of them girls is singing. It might be Shania, it might be one of them Lee Anns, I can’t tell. They got the same guitar players, the same producers, the same drumming. I’m quieting down that drum. That son of a bitch has got me mad! The drummer’s got to be part of the band for it to swing, rather than all of the band.

“And I really try to realize that the difference between poetry and music is the melody,” he continues. “There’s a lot of lyricists in country music but very few songwriters. I said to Willie Nelson the other day, ‘I guess Kris (Kristofferson) is about the best, isn’t he? And ol’ Willie said, ‘Yeah, after me and you.'” At that, Haggard laughs hard for a moment. Not because it’s a joke, mind you, but because he’s been around the block enough times to know the truth when he hears it.