Sing me back home before I die.--Merle Haggard, in a song about a Death Row prisoner's plea.
The music triumphed Tuesday night at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
Then it suffered a hard loss on Wednesday.
Early in his 210-minute concert Tuesday in Dallas, Bruce Springsteen took a break from a flurry of hard-driving rock 'n' roll to set context for a soft song.
It was about his late and tormented father, a depressed man who would wait up for him in a darkened kitchen, visible only by the red dot of a burning cigarette. The smoke-addicted father would insist that the guitar-addicted boy join him at the table.
The father--who'd done factory work and driven a bus--would tell the long-haired son to get rid of that guitar. The father would advise the son to accept that his life would be common and hard, because that's the way it was around there for people like them.
Springsteen said he wrote the song, called "Independence Day," in his early 20s as he was leaving his dying hometown of Freehold, N.J. In the song he tells his dad goodbye--"they ain't gonna do to me what I watched them do to you"--and pleads with his father to say goodbye to him.
Springsteen told the audience the song represented a realization and lamentation that all of us tend to come to only as adults, sometimes too late.
He said we spend our early childhood dependent on our parents and then spend our adolescence and young adulthood rebelling against those parents in pursuit of our dreams. He said that only later do we come to understand that our parents once also were innocently dependent, and rebellious, and that they, too, once had dreams--dreams that had been compromised by the reality and responsibility of a hard life raising kids in a hard place at a hard time.
Then Springsteen sang: "Papa, now I know the things you wanted that you could not say ... I swear I never meant to take those things away."
The next day I recalled that Springsteen got asked in an interview several years ago why he wrote songs about his father but not his more supportive mother. Springsteen replied that it was because Merle Haggard had already written definitively about mama.
Mama tried to raise Merle better, but her pleading Merle denied, which left only Merle to blame, because mama tried.
So Merle went to prison. But then Merle got out. He wrote and performed songs about mama and being sung back home when led to the gallows. And he wrote 36 other odes to working men and more admirable women that went to No. 1 on the country charts.
On Wednesday Merle died on his 79th birthday.
For years I dismissed Merle as a superficial redneck writing right-wing demagoguery about being an "Okie from Muskogee" who'd fight you if you criticized his country.
But then I did a couple of things we all ought to do for each other. I listened and learned.
Merle wrote soft, sweet melodies about silver wings and roaring engines taking a girlfriend away and leaving him lonely: "Don't leave me, I cried. Don't take that airplane ride. But you locked me out of your mind. Left me standing here behind."
Without a hint of right-wing demagoguery, he wrote and sang: "Twinkle, twinkle, lucky star. Can you send me luck from where you are? Can you make a rainbow shine that far?"
Late in life he wrote a song supporting Hillary Clinton and another urging the nation to get "out of Iraq and back on track."
I'm not saying Merle mellowed. I saw him do a show a few years ago at BJ's Star-Studded Honky Tonk. More than once he stopped himself in mid-lyric to drop his head below the mic and tell some perhaps inebriated fan at the foot of the stage that if the guy ever touched that microphone pole again--when all the poor guy had wanted was to drop a fan's written song request on stage ... well, I must not use here the language I heard Merle use there.
And I'm not saying he was liberal. I'm saying only what Merle himself said in an interview with the Boston Globe: "I'll tell you what the public likes more than anything. It's the most rare commodity in the world--honesty."
Honesty can confuse people in a lot of ways, but especially in politics.
So here I am thinking about my hardworking late dad and me; about my mama and me and that she still hasn't stopped trying; and about Bubba McCoy and me and that our cross-cultural conversations confuse people.
That is to say that the music is alive in me, from the live concert arena to beyond the grave.
Like a doomed prisoner, and like Merle, we're all walking toward our end. And we all need to be sung back to our beginnings every once in a while.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/10/2016