Wow, I'm really behind on these book reports. My idea with starting them was mainly to keep a record of what I'd been reading, and then maybe I'd be more likely to stick with it if I posted it "publicly" (as much as a blog with a couple of family members as readers can be public). So, that was the thought, and I've been fairly disciplined about keeping track of what books I've read and uploading a photo of the cover into a draft blog post, but that's about as far as I've gone in the last three months. So, starting with this one, I'm working from a few-months-old recollection of the book, so bear with me.
David Cantwell does a very disciplined job with his topic as he chooses to address it in Merle Haggard: The Running Kind. He basically looks at the career of Merle Haggard by strictly sticking to his discography, drawing from the many biographies and autobiographies that have been published about the man, but not including any interviews of his own. This doesn't lead to any fresh new information being unearthed, but for the well-trod ground that is Haggard's life and career, it's not really necessary. I think that his distance from the subject allows for some unique insights.
For instance, that Hag has been straddling a very thin line over nearly all of his post-"Okie from Muskogee" career by pandering (and sometimes dog-whistling) to the racist redneck portion of his fanbase by producing some songs that equate whiteness and ruralness with hard work and upright living (and at best implicitly shitting on the urban and "other") while still trying to retain some ironic distance from outright racism and warmongering himself. And he's done this while being a felon (pardoned by Reagan when he was California governor, yay) who has struggled with financial issues, multiple marriages, infidelity, and drug and alcohol problems throughout his life. In the instance of a more enlightened song like "Irma Jackson" that never saw the light of day as single, Cantwell takes an appropriately skeptical stance on Haggard's claims that the record company shut him down.
Hag's had a helluva career, and "Mama Tried" and "Sing Me Back Home" are fucking bangers and among my favorite country songs. But from "Okie" to "Fightin' Side of Me" to "I Take a Lot of Pride In What I Am" to "Working Man Blues," there's just too much there that's ended up on the wrong side of history. He's been an asshole, and there's not enough in his discography to put him in the black.
Note: If you haven't already, listen to the Cocaine & Rhinestones episode about Merle and "Okie", which draws a lot from this book.
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