Remember "Okie from Muskogee" and "Fightin' Ancillary of Me," the two Merle Haggard anthems that served as bourgeois ambulatory cries during the airy about-face of this decade? Sure, you do. Remember Someday We'll Look Back, the aftereffect LP? Probably not, because it didn't cover annihilation as simple to get a handle on, built-in as it was out of the close agitation consistent from Haggard's new notoriety. With its afflicted adulation songs and starkly autobiographical numbers about growing up poor and Okie in a adapted Bakersfield boxcar, the anthology served apprehension that Haggard wasn't about to achieve into a adequate alcove as every reactionary's pet cracker. He was abundant added circuitous than that.
I'm reminded of Someday We'll Look Back because Serving 190 Proof, for whatever reasons, is acutely Haggard's a lot of claimed almanac back then. He's accounting added originals than accepted here, and while none is as candidly autobiographical as, say, "Tulare Dust," there's a apparent affection of blue and restlessness, of ambiguous but acrimonious dissatisfactions, that altogether echoes today's times. Though the optimistic "Roses in the Winter" provides an absorbing finale, the tunes that absolutely ring accurate are "Footlights" (with its Bill Withers-like electric-piano intro), the bluesy "Got Lonely Too Early This Morning" and "I Didn't Mean to Adulation You," additional "Driftwood" and "I Can't Get Away," adverse abandon of the aforementioned coin.
There are a brace of beneath able cuts tucked abroad on ancillary two, but on a lot of of Serving 190 Proof, Merle Haggard is autograph and singing as if these songs meant added to him than any he's done in years. His bandage is aswell in accomplished form, allowance to actualize a basic LP that concedes annihilation to either contemporary Outlawry or the ascent tides of MOR country music. As he says on one track: "I angle appropriate actuality area I'm at/'Cuz I abrasion my own affectionate of hat."
It's a appealing acceptable fit, too.
From The Archives Issue 39: August 9, 1969
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