About The Song
Merle Haggard could have been a John Steinbeck invention. Haggard certainly would have made a perfect anti-hero for one of the great writer’s American epics. A product of a poor migrating Okie family, Merle spent his childhood living in a junked boxcar that his father had converted into a house in Bakersfield, California, or as many of the locals called it, Oklahoma West. Raised in a strict Church of Christ household, the boy grew up singing hymns with his mother Flossie and yodeling Jimmie Rodgers songs with his father James. Almost destitute but always proud, the family often lived from meal to meal. Yet by the time young Merle turned nine in 1946, it seemed as if things were getting better. The post-World War II economy had improved and good times appeared to lie ahead. Then, James died.
While she held down a job, Flossie Haggard kept her young son on a tight leash for the next few years. In retrospect, it was probably too tight. In his early teens Merle rebelled. He began to skip school and became involved in juvenile crime. Sent to a boys’ home, he escaped and drifted full-time into petty crime. From there Merle moved into theft, hot checks, fencing stolen goods and grand theft auto. He was in and out of local jails and knew all the area judges by sight. Worse yet, they knew him too. If Merle hadn’t been apprehended and placed in prison in 1957, he very well might have died a violent death while committing even more serious crimes.
Sentenced to a stretch in San Quentin, Haggard again mixed with the wrong crowd. Trouble followed him even behind bars. A week in solitary confinement finally gave him an opportunity to evaluate his life. A later visit with a death-row inmate who was eventually executed forced Haggard to look deeper at what he had become and redirect his energy into more productive ventures. Released in 1960, Merle vowed to never again see the inside of a prison. For the ex-convict, things on the outside were tough. Haggard’s salvation was the emergence of Bakersfield as the West Coast center for country music. Following in the footsteps of Buck Owens, Merle worked construction in the daytime and played music in local honky-tonks and bars at night. By the mid-1960s, performing had become his full-time occupation and Haggard was one of the area’s best-known singers.
Capitol records took note and signed Haggard just five years after his release from prison. Immediately Merle began to chalk up some pretty decent record sales and develop a national following. Many of his early compositions reflected his own life’s situation, and their stark honesty seemed to appeal to an ever-growing audience. In 1966, Merle reached the Top Ten three times and landed the first of his 38 chart-toppers with “The Fugitive.” Three more #1 hits followed in 1967-68 including “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home” and “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.” Except for the ode to the Depression-era robbery team, each new release appeared to mirror moments of Haggard’s own life. By 1968, Merle’s fame had grown to the point that a movie production team from Hollywood came calling. Not only did they want Haggard to join Dick Clark and Robert Walker in the film “Killers Three,” they also wanted Merle to write a song for the movie. Drawing much more from his own life than the script, Haggard painted an unmitigated picture that showed what could have happened to him had he not pulled away from a path of crime.
For “Mama Tried,” Haggard touched directly upon the pain and anguish he had caused his own mother. It was the loving woman’s wasted efforts that had brought Merle his deepest shame while he served his time. Haggard had to take a few liberties when working out the lyrics to “Mama Tried.” Merle had drawn a sentence of one to fifteen years but he couldn’t get that to rhyme with anything, so he ended up making the situation more bleak than it actually was (“I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole”). In all, Haggard served two years and nine months in San Quentin. The song’s narrative may have been partly fictitious, but the emotion that ran through each of the verses was real. Framed perfectly with a simple musical line, “Mama Tried” was not only a musical tribute to a mother whose desires for her wayward son went unheeded, but it resulted in reaching untold numbers of sons and daughters alike who, while they might not have ever spent time in prison, somehow felt that they had fallen short of living up to their mothers’ expectations. “Mama Tried” was their song too.
Released in the early summer of 1968, “Mama Tried” reached the Billboard country singles chart in late July and by mid-August the song locked onto the #1 position and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. In a career that saw Merle Haggard chart more than one hundred singles, this autobiographical number would rank as his second most popular (behind “Okie From Muskogee”). By the time that “Mama Tried” topped the charts, Haggard was beginning to be recognized as one of the nation’s foremost country music tunesmiths. Merle always felt uncomfortable with almost all forms of praise, but one reporter dubbed him the “working man’s poet,” which pleased him a great deal. That was all he really wanted to be, a voice for the common man.
Because he was such a great and powerful entertainer, Merle Haggard’s songwriting capabilities were sometimes overshadowed by his complexity as an individual. The honesty he displayed in his tunes revealed many of his unique characteristics. In his earliest compositions, what seemed to come through the loudest was the need to unburden himself of his guilt as well as the anguish he brought into other people’s lives (particularly his mother’s). With the heartfelt response to his songs, the American people pardoned Merle long before the state of California did. Looking back over a career that produced such a great wealth of material, one senses that Flossie Haggard realized that all of her heartaches and sacrifices had not been in vain. – JH
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Lyrics
The first thing I remember knowin’
Was a lonesome whistle blowin’
And a young un’s dream of growin’ up to ride
On a freight train leavin’ town
Not knowin’ where I’m bound
And no one could change my mind but Mama tried
One and only rebel child
From a family, meek and mild
My Mama seemed to know what lay in store
Despite all my Sunday learnin’
Towards the bad, I kept on turnin’
‘Til Mama couldn’t hold me anymore
And I turned twenty-one in prison doin’ life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause Mama tried
Dear old Daddy, rest his soul
Left my Mom a heavy load
She tried so very hard to fill his shoes
Workin’ hours without rest
Wanted me to have the best
She tried to raise me right but I refused
And I turned twenty-one in prison doin’ life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause Mama tried
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