Haggard Delivers Honky-Tonk Masterpiece - Review of "Roots Volume 1"
This orginially ran in the Redding Record Searchlight in November 2001Sitting comfortably at No. 26 on this week's Billboard album chart is the soundtrack from the Coen Brothers' film Oh Brother Where Art Thou? -- undoubtedly the sleeper hit of the 2001 music year. Oh Brother, a depression-era adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, is a folk-roots masterpiece. True to Homer's form, its music deals with the themes of hard times, interminable wandering, dreams of heaven, and the search for lost love, family and home.
Merle Haggard's Roots Volume 1 (Anti/Epitaph), which was released Tuesday, just might be a honky-tonk adaptation of Homer's war epic the Iliad. The album deals with the themes of honky-tonk life as seen through the eyes of songwriters Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, Hank Thompson, Fred Rose and Merle Haggard. Honky-tonk life was and still is the realm of the strange warfare of love and relationships, of table dances and infidelities, and their resultant fights and messy divorces. Tales describing this sort of warfare are often beautiful. True to Homeric form, the songs on Roots Volume 1 are both epic and beautiful.
Haggard states in the liner notes to Roots Volume 1 that his affinity for the songs and the writers covered on the album caused him to rise to the occasion and reach for the stars, so to speak. He has indeed reached the Olympian heights of the legends to whom he is paying homage. Simplicity is a mark of genius, as Merle and his collaborators have proven with this album, recorded with no overdubs in the living room of Haggard's home in Palo Cedro. Hats off to them for capturing the simple elegance and the human essence of country music and delivering it to us in a time of great uncertainty, when the country music airwaves are clogged with mass-produced, bland Nashville Pablum.
Merle Haggard is both an heir and an equal to the aforementioned legends -- Frizzell, Williams, Thompson and Rose. One listen to the three Haggard originals on the album will establish this as a fact. His Runaway Mama is very possibly the greatest Lefty Frizzell song never recorded. Cottonwood resident Norm Stevens, a former lead guitarist for Frizzell and current member of Haggard's band The Strangers, wrote in the liner notes that the Great Manager brought Merle and Norm to where they are now. Roots Volume 1 illustrates the product of their musical collaboration. It will provide a glimpse of heaven to any fan of traditional country music. If this album is not recognized as the best country music album of the year, I am living in the wrong universe. Perhaps the most enticing aspect of Roots Volume 1 is the insinuation that it's only the first volume in a multi-volume set of roots recordings.
If Oh Brother Where Art Thou is an adaptation of the Odyssey and Roots Volume 1 is considered an adaptation of the Iliad, future volumes of the Haggard roots series may be akin tc the lost books of Homer. There are great things in store for country music fans.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 11:17 AM
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