{"id":5946,"date":"2025-10-04T11:02:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T15:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5946"},"modified":"2025-10-04T11:07:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T15:07:20","slug":"mama-tried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/mama-tried\/","title":{"rendered":"Mama Tried (Merle Haggard)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Mama Tried (Merle Haggard)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/36mxogCPOBs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>As noted in the posts for &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/swinging-doors\/\">Swinging Doors<\/a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pride-in-what-i-am\/\">I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am<\/a>,&#8221; I&#8217;m a big Merle Haggard fan, and this has always been one of my favorites. It&#8217;s one of his most autobiographical songs <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5953\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Merle-and-mom2.jpg?resize=212%2C235&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"212\" height=\"235\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Merle-and-mom2.jpg?w=392&amp;ssl=1 392w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Merle-and-mom2.jpg?resize=270%2C300&amp;ssl=1 270w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 212px) 100vw, 212px\" \/>&#8212; pretty much straight-up life story except that he was just doing a three-year stretch in San Quentin, not &#8220;life without parole.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In an indication of how things have changed, he tried to conceal that part of his life for the first years of his career &#8212; but this song was released in 1968, shortly after the <em>Johnny Cash at Folsom<\/em> <em>Prison<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Merle tended to describe his criminal youth as a mix of unfocused rebellion and stupidity &#8212; 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&#8217;t just come around to the front. &#8220;If we&#8217;d had any sense at all, we would have just laughed and walked around to the front like it was some big joke,&#8221; he wrote in his memoir, <em>Sing Me Back Home<\/em>. Instead, &#8220;Like fools, we ran.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He wrote this song about ten years later, and it was his fifth number one country hit, following &#8220;I&#8217;m a Lonesome Fugitive,&#8221; &#8220;Branded Man,&#8221; &#8220;Sing Me Back Home&#8221; (about a man on death row),&#8221; and &#8220;The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.&#8221; You get the idea.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5954 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Killers-Three-poster.jpg?resize=264%2C393&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"264\" height=\"393\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Killers-Three-poster.jpg?w=350&amp;ssl=1 350w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Killers-Three-poster.jpg?resize=202%2C300&amp;ssl=1 202w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 264px) 100vw, 264px\" \/>While researching this post, I learned that this was the theme song to a movie,\u00a0<em>Killers Three<\/em>, which also marked Merle&#8217;s acting debut &#8211;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 <em>American Bandstand<\/em> fame. It&#8217;s up on Youtube. I&#8217;m not recommending it.<\/p>\n<p>As for the song, I was startled to read Merle explaining in an <a href=\"https:\/\/bluerailroad.wordpress.com\/story-behind-a-song-merle-haggard-mama-tried\/\">interview with Paul Zollo<\/a> that his approach on the recording was &#8220;trying to land somewhere in between Peter, Paul &amp; Mary and Johnny Cash.&#8221; It would never have occurred to me that he was going for the PP&amp;M crowd, but of course Cash had broken into the mainstream with appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and on the TV folk show <em>Hootenanny<\/em> (and a ghastly movie called <em>Hootenanny Hoot<\/em>), 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 &#8220;folky guitar&#8221; in Haggard&#8217;s words &#8212; fingerpicking a repetitive riff on a Dobro &#8212; and Bonnie Owens and Glen Campbell fill out the two-guys-and-a-gal vocal harmonies on the chorus.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;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&#8217;m playing all these songs from memory, I didn&#8217;t check the record until I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As noted in the posts for &#8220;Swinging Doors&#8221; and &#8220;I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,&#8221; I&#8217;m a big Merle Haggard fan, and this has always been one of my favorites. It&#8217;s one of his most autobiographical songs &#8212; pretty much straight-up life story except that he was just doing a three-year &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/mama-tried\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Mama Tried (Merle Haggard)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - 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I started hitchhiking from Chapel Hill, planning to hug the coast till I reached Mexico. That afternoon I saw my first roadkill armadillo while walking the last five miles into Southport, North Carolina. On the edge of town\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/me-and-merle.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5211,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cigarettes-and-coffee\/","url_meta":{"origin":5946,"position":1},"title":"Cigarettes and Coffee Blues (Lefty Frizzell)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 8, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I have Bill Morrissey to thank for turning me into a Merle Haggard nut, and making me realize how close country\u00a0 music -- especially the strain popularized as \"honky tonk\" -- is to blues. Of course, to a large extent it came out of blues; Jimmie Rodgers was primarily a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Leftys-Greatest-Hits.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3220,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pride-in-what-i-am\/","url_meta":{"origin":5946,"position":2},"title":"I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am (Merle Haggard)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 2, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This is another I learned for my trip south in 1985-86, though I particularly remember playing it after getting back to Cambridge, at one of my all-time favorite bar gigs. The venue was Jack's on Mass Ave., and I know I played this because one of the local folkies asked\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Elijah-Wald-Jacks-poster.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2779,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lovesick-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":5946,"position":3},"title":"Lovesick Blues (Hank Williams\/Emmett Miller)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 29, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Like virtually everybody, I first heard this as a Hank Willams song, though I'm not sure when or how. As I've mentioned, my Cambridge folk scene upbringing initially made me resistant to mainstream Nashville country music, Williams included, but by\u00a0 the early 1980s I was gradually coming to my senses\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/HankWilliams1952-286x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3801,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/me-and-billy\/","url_meta":{"origin":5946,"position":4},"title":"Me and Billy the Kid (Joe Ely)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 30, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I've already written about my introduction to Joe Ely and my affection for his work, and I'm happy to revisit the subject, because I owe him a lot. Beyond the great songs I learned off his records, and the records themselves, it was a whole attitude toward music. Along with\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Ely-Liberty-Lunch-297x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5499,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cold-cold-heart\/","url_meta":{"origin":5946,"position":5},"title":"Cold, Cold Heart (Hank Williams)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"January 4, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I have no idea when or where I learned \"Cold, Cold Heart\" -- it must have been sometime after the 1970s, because I didn't grow up with classic country, aside from a couple of Johnny Cash records and the cheapo anthology where I learned \"Lonesome 7-7203.\" That changed in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Hank-Williams-Portrait-e1732315103762.webp?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5946"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5971,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5946\/revisions\/5971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}