Pop songs and pop vocalizing have been busy influencing what we call country music for precisely as long as country music has been around. From Charlie Poole recording for Columbia because that’s where his hero Al Jolson worked, to Milton Brown cutting “Who’s Sorry Now”, to the Bing Crosby-influenced styles of Gene Autry, Tommy Duncan, Floyd Tillman, Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Ray Price, all the way up to a contemporary exemplar of the tradition like, say, George Strait, this inter-genre relationship hasn’t exactly been a secret.
On the other hand, even while the connections between country and all those Tin Pan Alley standards (what Tony Bennett calls the Great American Songbook) can be found all over the place, few country artists have made the connections explicit across an entire album. Perhaps the first of these efforts, and certainly the best, was Marty Robbins’ 1962 album Marty After Midnight. And of course the best-known Tin Pan-country tribute was Stardust, Willie Nelson’s Booker T. Jones-produced album from 1978. But after that pair of standouts, the genre peters out pretty quickly.
Add Unforgettable to the short list. Merle Haggard has always gone out of his way to honor the artists and sounds that made him who he is — he’s cut tributes to Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Elvis Presley, Dixieland jazz, Lefty Frizzell and Tommy “Leonard” Collins, to cite just the most obvious examples — so it’s not in the least surprising that this longtime Crosby admirer, and songwriter’s songwriter, would eventually get around to crooning classic compositions such as “Pennies From Heaven”, “Stardust”, “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You”, “As Time Goes By”, and the Nat King Cole-associated title track.
No surprise, either, that he would nail those standards and several others as well, especially since he’s backed here within roomy combo arrangement by a rotating cast that includes pianist Floyd Domino, fiddler Johnny Gimble, and guitarists Red Volkaert and Randy Mason. Of course it’s Haggard’s singing that’s the main point, and all through this collection, Haggard suggests he has real history with these particular lyrics and melodies. It’s easy to imagine he’s been singing them around the house and on the bus, or humming them quietly while he drops another line into Lake Shasta, for decades now.
Haggard’s phrasing has a knowing deftness that reveals the way a line such as “Woman needs man, man must have his mate” (from “As Time Goes By”) is at once deliberately silly and deadly serious. Likewise for the way that “The North Pole I’ve charted, but I can’t started, with you” (from his sax-backed reading of “I Can’t Get Started”) is every bit as earnest as it is fanciful.
Best of all is a version of “Cry Me A River” that finds Merle pronouncing the opening “Now you say you’re lonely” with a mixture of longing, heartache and Fuck You that is actually uncomfortable to hear. Hag’s reading makes the best-known version of the song, by Julie London, sound like she just won the lottery.
Now 68, Haggard has been on one hell of an unexpected roll since the turn of the century. Unforgettable, the poppiest of the bunch, and of his career for that matter, just might be the finest of these “comeback” records yet.