Merle Haggard and a Strange Decade

IT IS LATE 1970 or early 1971 — I'm not sure anymore about the date. I also don't recall for sure whether Merle Haggard has yet released Someday Well Look Back, his troubled declaration of independence from 'Okie From Muskogee' and 'Fightin' Side of Me', but I'm pretty sure he hasn't. At any rate, it's those two songs that most people know him for — even the shamelessly opportunistic President and Vice President (both of them discredited since then) have hailed Hag specifically for those right-wing ballads, as though they were the only things of value he's done in his entire career. These are extremely polarized times, and how Merle feels about his notoriety — how he even feels about those two songs, which he says were a joke but he sorta means it and sorta doesn't, or something like that — is not very clear. But at the very least, he's uncomfortable with both the amount and the kind of attention he's been getting.