Earlier this week, we shared the unfortunate news that country legend Merle Haggard had passed away at the age of 79, succumbing to a double pneumonia on his birthday. Haggard was a legendary musician who’s songs traveled far and wide, and a couple of his selections (“Sing Me Back Home” and “Mama Tried,” in particular) were staples of the Grateful Dead catalog.
With that in mind, it’s not surprising that the band’s tenured guitarist Bob Weir, would want to share his thoughts about the late great Haggard. In an interview published in the Post-Gazette, Weir spoke fondly of Haggard’s work.
“I listened to a lot of country music when I was a kid,” he said. “If there was a clunker song on the rock ’n’ roll station, oftentimes the country button was the first one I’d hit, because there wasn’t a huge difference — still isn’t for that matter — between the country presentation and the rock ’n’ roll presentation…I was listening to Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty for that matter, Johnny Cash.”
Interestingly, there was something of a cultural divide between the Grateful Dead’s counterculture movement and Haggard’s “Silent Majority” of the late 1960’s, which came to a head on the hit single “Okie From Muskogee.”
Weir said, “When he came out with ‘Okie from Muskogee,’ I had a pretty strong suspicion that he was laughing all the way to the bank. I had a pretty strong suspicion that he was smoking pot on the back of his tour bus and he came up with a character, and as a writer, as a storyteller — and a singer is storyteller, any artist is a storyteller, first and foremost — he is painting a picture of a character and it resonated with a lot of folks. But that was not a statement of who he was, and I did not suspect it was. And I read in later interviews with him that, like I said, they were laughing all the way to the bank with that one. As a writer you don’t know why this character presents himself to you and lets you color him in, and you don’t even ask why, you just go with it.”
Weir continued, saying “I was in my early 20s when the song came out, but I knew instinctively that was what he was doing, and so when I was listening to it on the radio, I was living with that character as he was letting the character express himself on the recording. I wasn’t being judgmental about why is he writing this kind of stuff. I don’t judge other writers by what they write about, what stories they choose to tell, because a writer often doesn’t have that choice. What comes IS what comes.”
If ever there was proof that Weir and the Dead held no grudges with Haggard, it’s this classic version of “Mama Tried” from the band’s famed 5/8/77 performance at Barton Hall. Enjoy: