Merle Haggard – Strangers / Swinging Doors And The Bottle Let Me Down / I’m a Lonesome Fugitive / Branded Man / Mama Tried/ Pride in What I Am / Sing Me Back Home / The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde / Hag / Someday We’ll Look Back

It would be more than a little foolish to attempt a nutshell summation of a body of work as knotty and varied as Merle Haggard’s. But why let that stop us? In “Too Many Bridges To Cross Over”, the closing track to his much-lauded album Mama Tried, Haggard advises the woman he’s with not to grow too accustomed to having him around. “Like an eagle,” he warns her, “I’m a prisoner of the wind.”

You could parse that line for the rest of your days and never get to the bottom of all it suggests regarding the hotwired relationship between individual freedom and the limits that come built into being human. Indeed, Haggard has made that tension the focus of his work. Complicating things further, “Too Many Bridges” was written not by Merle but by Dallas Frazier, the songwriter Haggard turned to in his glory days even more frequently than he did Liz Anderson and Tommy Collins.

Still, Frazier’s line — and the regretful way Haggard delivers what on the surface is a boast — gets to the conflicted essence of the Haggard aesthetic. In short, Haggard is a populist, and his art comes with all of the unresolved tensions that label implies. Like so many of his country men and women, Haggard wants first and foremost just to be left alone to do whatever he wants to do. Yet, almost always, what he wants to do — and this, too, identifies him as a solidly mainstream American — is bow to tradition, and he assumes others should do the same.

This worldview, what Tex Sample has termed “populist anarchism,” explains how Haggard can come off as steadfastly for the little guy and at the same time seem so strongly supportive of the very social, religious and political institutions that ensure little guys stay little. As a life philosophy, this is all pretty muddled. As a body work, however, it is breathtaking.

Which is one reason why these reissues from Capitol/EMI are so welcome. Most of what’s here has been available scattered across import discs for awhile. But these ten early Haggard albums, paired on five twofers that each come with at least a couple of previously unreleased cuts, offer a fresh look at the most significant catalogue in all of modern country music — and one of the great American artistic achievements, period.

Listen again to the delicate touch and emphatic storytelling with which Haggard delivers “Sing A Sad Song”, the number he begged off his then boss Wynn Stewart and his first real chart success, and it’s easy to conclude that Haggard was a fully realized artist out of the gate. Except we know he was going to get better.

Much better. On his early solo albums — Strangers from 1965 and Swinging Doors from the following year, I’m A Lonesome Fugitive and Branded Man from 1967, and 1968’s Sing Me Back Home and The Legend Of Bonnie & Clyde — Haggard sings in higher keys and his voice has little texture compared to the mature instrument he would develop within the decade. He phrases sometimes a bit too much like other singers, too — Stewart, Lefty Frizzell, even his Bakersfield rival Buck Owens. His albums are consistently excellent from the start, but they also are also a tad generic in their arrangements, a touch too obvious in their choice of covers, and his own songs are not yet always classics (“The Girl Turned Ripe”, anyone?).

Little by little in these youthful years, though, all the elements of a distinctive Haggard style begin to trip into place. The low, sustained, subtle vibrato he hits at the end of a phrase. His menacing, accusatory responses to love gone wrong, or about to, in songs such as “You Don’t Even Try”, “I’ll Always Know”, and “I’m Going To Break Every Heart I Can”. The amazing songs about men on the run — think of the empathy Haggard exhibits for the ex-con in “Branded Man” — or, as in “Sing Me Back Home”, about men whose running days are done. And those melodically indelible original ballads, too, such as “Somewhere Between” and “I Started Loving You Again”, voiced with such exquisite pain that they leave this world’s greatest George Jones fan offering a mea culpa.

Mama Tried from 1968 finds all of the pieces in place and was Haggard’s first truly great album. Just one example: David Allen Coe’s and Steve Goodman’s claims for “You Never Even Called My By My Name” aside, it’s this album’s title track — mama, a misspent youth, prison, a perfect blending of acoustic and electric elements, and an arrangement that identifies itself from the first notes — that is the perfect country song. I Take A Lot Of Pride In What I Am, from the same year, would be a high-water mark in any other career, but after Mama Tried, it seems something of a letdown.

From there, these reissues jump to the 1971 album Hag, a three-year gap in the story that omits two of the best tribute albums anyone has ever recorded (to Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills) as well as the live albums (Okie From Muskogee and Fightin’ Side Of Me) that left Merle a household name even within those houses that looked down on country music. And never mind the three instrumental LPs that the Strangers cut during the same three-year stretch. Unfortunately, listening to these new reissues without the above albums in the sequence — albums that are among the most important in country music history — has the effect of making Haggard’s contribution seem much smaller than it really was, as if he were interested in just one sort of thing instead of…almost everything.

There’s an argument to be made for why those albums (and his early duet album with Bonnie Owens, also not included in this series) are of a different type and therefore warrant being plucked from the chronology. But there’s no justifying also skipping over 1971’s A Portrait Of Merle Haggard, a solo effort that only included such minor Haggard recordings as “Working Man Blues”, “Silver Wings” and “Hungry Eyes”.

As the ’60s turned into the ’70s, Merle was on a pretty decent roll, huh? Indeed, it is likely that no other American musical artist has ever produced so much masterful work in such a brief time as Haggard did between the release of Mama Tried in 1968 and, say, Let Me Tell You About A Song in 1972. (Haggard kept going strong after that, of course, but the quality and quantity of his output returned to levels more commonly associated with mere mortals.)

The Hag followed Hag with a gospel album, The Land Of Many Churches (yes, it too is omitted from the sequence). What came next was Someday We’ll Look Back, another Haggard classic, from the limited optimism of the fragile title track that opens the album to the quartet of masterpieces that close it: the Dallas Frazier/Earl Montgomery co-write “California Cottonfields”, which along with Liz Anderson’s “The Fugitive” stands as the best “Merle Haggard song” Merle didn’t write; the menacing countrypolitan of “Carolyn”; the working-boy blues of “Tulare Dust”; and “Huntsville”, about a prisoner determined not to go there.

But the real revelation here is Hag, an album that, as its eponymous title suggests, is all about Haggard and the battle within him between the individualist’s desire to bend the world to his wishes and the fatalist’s conviction that the world is not something that can be bent by so meager a force as human will. “Like the ancient Roman Empire, this world is doomed to fall, and it’s much too big a thing for mortal man,” he predicts at one point, adding later that “I’m a good loser, born to be that way.” In “Sidewalks Of Chicago”, Haggard’s homeless narrator admits, “If I buy the bread, I can’t afford the wine.” And the wine is non-negotiable. On Hag, the individualist doesn’t stand a chance.

“It’s a way of mine to say just what I’m thinking and to do the things I really want to do,” he tells a lover who wants to change him in “I Can’t Be Myself”. “But I believe the Lord knows I’m unhappy ’cause I can’t be myself when I’m with you.” And there it is again, Merle Haggard in a nutshell. In these lines, he’s an eagle again, soaring free. But then the wind picks up — “I can’t be myself and be what pleases you,” he cries, his voice suddenly buffeted into a fragile falsetto — and there is nothing you can do about the wind.