Let Me Tell You About a Song
| Let Me Tell You About a Song | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||
| Studio album by Merle Haggard | ||||
| Released | June 1972 | |||
| Recorded | August 30 at Buck Owens Studio, Bakersfield, CA and November 8, 18-19, 1971 at Capitol Records Studio, Hollywood, CA | |||
| Genre | Country | |||
| Label | Capitol ST-882 | |||
| Producer | Ken Nelson | |||
| Merle Haggard chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
  |
| Robert Christgau | (B+) |
Let Me Tell You About a Song is the sixteenth studio album by American country singer Merle Haggard, released in 1972. It reached #7 on the Billboard Country album chart and #166 on the Pop album chart. The lead-off singles were "Grandma Harp" and "Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)" — both reached #1.
The album includes Haggard explaining the origins of each song with spoken introductions while praising the talents of those who inspired him, such as Tommy Collins and Bob Wills. Compositionally, the album is split between Haggard originals and cover songs written by Collins, Wills, Red Foley and Joe Simpson, and also contains two #1 country hits, "Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)" and "Grandma Harp," both penned by Haggard. According to the liner notes to the 1994 box set Down Every Road, "Daddy Frank" derived from stories his wife Bonnie Owens had told him about her own mother, who had a hearing problem, and her father, who wasn't blind but loved to play harmonica. Haggard wed their story to that of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, who had moved from Alabama to California by boxcar during the Depression before forming their famous hillbilly boogie band. The young voices heard on "Daddy Frank" are those of his daughter Dana and of his manager Fuzzy Owen's daughter Cindy.
The album also contains "Irma Jackson," a song Merle describes in his preamble as his favorite "because it tells it like it is" but had remained unreleased because "the time wasn't right." The song tells the story of a doomed interracial romance between a white man and an African-American woman. Haggard had wanted to follow his hit "Okie from Muskogee" with the song but was advised not to by his record label. As Jonathan Bernstein recounts in his online Rolling Stone article "Merle Haggard Reluctantly Unveils 'The Fightin' Side of Me'", "Hoping to distance himself from the harshly right-wing image he had accrued in the wake of the hippie-bashing "Muskogee," Haggard wanted to take a different direction and release "Irma Jackson" as his next single... When the Bakersfield, California native brought the song to his record label, executives were reportedly appalled. In the wake of 'Okie,' Capitol Records was not interested in complicating Haggard's conservative, blue-collar image." After "The Fightin' Side of Me" was released instead, Haggard later commented to the Wall Street Journal, "People are narrow-minded. Down South they might have called me a nigger lover." In an interview with Cantwell in 2001, Haggard stated that his producer Ken Nelson, who was also head of the country division at Capitol at the time, never interfered with his music but "this one time he came out and said, 'Merle...I don't believe the world is ready for this yet'...And he might have been right. I might've canceled out where I was headed in my career."
...
Wikipedia