Country music is currently enjoying its greatest boom since Ray Charles broke every cultural barrier with his Modern Sounds in Country Music album six years ago, injecting new life into what then appeared to be a dying form. That the present boom is largely the result of a series of coincidences (Shelby Singleton's triumphant return to Nashville. the emergence of Glen Campbell as a ratings-puller on national television, the dramatic come-back of Johnny Cash, etc.) is beyond argument, but there is undoubtedly a rapidly growing interest in and respect for C&W from erstwhile rock fans and performers.
form for the very reason that it previously received so little national exposure. The apple-pie stigma it suffered so long is now interpreted (with much patronizing) as simplicity and honesty by an increasingly large percentage of the hip mass.
It would seem that those who cannot stand the competition in what Billboard blandly refers to as "progressive rock" are turning on to C&W primarily for therapeutical reasons.
Stetsons and cowboy boots are fun to wear if you're not herding cattle in a thunderstorm and, of course, if you want to get your head in shape, where better to go than the country where the good folks are not only quaint, but call a spade a spade? What better cure for an addled brain?
The trend is not unhealthy (it produced a masterful album from the Byrds), but if country music is to reassume an influential role in the shaping of contemporary pop it is essential that its true progenitors be heard. For as in any other form of commercial art, the Sargasso Sea is thick and slushy, the pearl rare.
Though his records have never leaked over into pop radio. Merle Haggard has emerged as one of the most interesting voices in modern country music and in his three-year association with Capitol he has established an identity for himself with a lengthy chain of hit country singles and consequent LPs. Mama Tried is his eighth and newest album for the label.
Perhaps the reason he has enjoyed so little pop success is that he has seldom—of ever—been exposed to a culturally integrated audience (though he has been invited to perform at the Newport Folk Festival this year).
More likely is the fact that Merle Haggard is pure country—a small, tough, jowly man from Bakersfield who is married to his sometime singing partner. Bonnie Owens, who performs in a spangled suit in the country skull-orchards, whose sound, bearing traces of his famous brother-in-law, falls somewhere between Lefty Frizell and early Johnny Cash and who has addressed himself exclusively to Nixon's "silent majority," the suburban working class.
His songs romanticize the hardships and tragedies of America's transient proletarian and his success is resultant of his inherent ability to relate to his audience a commonplace experience wi
