Rating:
Genre:
Country
Release Date: 11/06/2007
A number of
Merle Haggard box sets preceded this one to fruition, among them 1996's four-disc,100-track
Down Every Road, as comprehensive and essential a collection of
country music as you're ever likely to hear. At three discs and 60 tracks,
Time Life's
Legends of American Music: The Original Outlaw admittedly doesn't offer as much
Hag, but in its own way it's just as valuable as the earlier release, and might be preferable for those who don't want their
Hag spread quite so thin but who would still like a bit more than the 40 tracks offered by
Razor & Tie's 1995, 40-track
The Lonesome Fugitive: The Merle Haggard Anthology (1963-1977). Like
Down Every Road,
The Original Outlaw takes a look not only at the biggest hits of
Haggard's career, although those are all of course accounted for. It launches with two pre-fame singles
Haggard cut for the small
Tally label in 1964-1965, before signing to
Capitol,
"Sing a Sad Song" and
"(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers." From there it devotes roughly half of its contents to those
Capitol sides before moving on to
Haggard's
MCA output of the late '70s and his recordings for
Epic,
Anti and his own
Hag Records in the subsequent decades. All that's absent -- and no one will really miss it -- is some representation of
Haggard's early-'90s stint with
Curb, a period that produced no memorable hits whose omission would cause a red flag to be raised only by completists.
Haggard's post-
Capitol recordings would, for any other artist, still amount to a body of work to be praised and envied:
MCA and
Epic singles such as
"Big City," "Pancho and Lefty" (with
Willie Nelson) and
"Yesterday's Wine" (with
George Jones) are formidable, and the samplings of his rootsy 21st century releases should send those unfamiliar with them scurrying to catch up with what
Haggard's been up to, as they've all been excellent additions to his canon. In the end, though, it'll still be those
Capitol recordings that will define
Merle Haggard and, to some extent, the direction in which
country music turned once he arrived -- even the most die-hard fan will never tire of hearing that string of more than 20 number one hits
Haggard gave the label. All of them are here -- the landmarks like
"Okie from Muskogee," "Working Man's Blues," "The Fightin' Side of Me," "Mama Tried," "Daddy Frank," "If We Make It Through December" -- as well as a couple that "only" scraped into the Top Five:
"I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am" and
"Someday We'll Look Back." Arranged in rough, but not strict, chronological order, the set amply demonstrates
Hag's evolution as both songwriter and interpreter of those songs, and restates the case for him as one of
country music's greatest contributions to the American musical lexicon -- not that that wasn't obvious already.
~Jeff Tamarkin, All Music Guide
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