As noted in the posts for “Swinging Doors” and “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” I’m a big Merle Haggard fan, and this has always been one of my favorites. It’s one of his most autobiographical songs — pretty much straight-up life story except that he was just doing a three-year stretch in San Quentin, not “life without parole.”

In an indication of how things have changed, he tried to conceal that part of his life for the first years of his career — but this song was released in 1968, shortly after the Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison LP, and between that album and Merle being hailed as the most soulful country singer and songwriter since Hank Williams, a stretch in prison became a kind of hallmark of country authenticity.

Merle tended to describe his criminal youth as a mix of unfocused rebellion and stupidity — in particular the event that led to that three-year stretch, which involved him and a buddy getting drunk and deciding to rob a local restaurant, breaking in through the back door at what they thought was three in the morning, but was actually around ten p.m. The owner recognized them and asked why they hadn’t just come around to the front. “If we’d had any sense at all, we would have just laughed and walked around to the front like it was some big joke,” he wrote in his memoir, Sing Me Back Home. Instead, “Like fools, we ran.”

He wrote this song about ten years later, and it was his fifth number one country hit, following “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home” (about a man on death row),” and “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.” You get the idea.

While researching this post, I learned that this was the theme song to a movie, Killers Three, which also marked Merle’s acting debut –though his appearance is limited to two or three lines and some bemused head-shaking. The movie includes a couple of other songs by him and his wife (briefly) and singing partner (long-term), Bonnie Owens, but this one is just played as an instrumental under the opening credits. The movie is a complicated tale of bootlegging, romance, and a nice boy gone wrong, produced, co-written, and co-starring Dick Clark, of American Bandstand fame. It’s up on Youtube. I’m not recommending it.

As for the song, I was startled to read Merle explaining in an interview with Paul Zollo that his approach on the recording was “trying to land somewhere in between Peter, Paul & Mary and Johnny Cash.” It would never have occurred to me that he was going for the PP&M crowd, but of course Cash had broken into the mainstream with appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and on the TV folk show Hootenanny (and a ghastly movie called Hootenanny Hoot), so that made commercial sense. And when you listen to the record with that in mind, you can hear it. It starts with James Burton playing “folky guitar” in Haggard’s words — fingerpicking a repetitive riff on a Dobro — and Bonnie Owens and Glen Campbell fill out the two-guys-and-a-gal vocal harmonies on the chorus.

I didn’t remember that. What I remembered was the electric guitar bend that comes in over Burton, which I thought was Burton, since I once heard him play it live, but turns out to have been Roy Nichols. Since the idea of the Songobiography is that I’m playing all these songs from memory, I didn’t check the record until I’d done my video, but I had that bend in my head, and the way it comes back to end the song, and kind of echo those bits, kinda sorta.