Merle Haggard - Mama Tried

Pressed on 180-gram vinyl for this limited edition, Mama Tried finds Merle Haggard in 1968 turning his own hard-luck past into some of the most honest country music ever put to tape.

Haggard had served time in San Quentin before music offered him a way out, and the title song draws on that history with unflinching candour: the story of a wayward son who turned twenty-one in prison despite a mother's best efforts. It became one of his signature songs and anchors an album steeped in wrongdoing, regret and the long road home.

Produced by Ken Nelson at Capitol in Hollywood, the record shows The Strangers at their tightest, with Roy Nichols' clean, cutting guitar and Norman Hamlet's weeping steel framing that warm, weathered voice. Haggard brings lived-in sympathy to Folsom Prison Blues, tipping his hat to Johnny Cash, and his take on Green, Green Grass of Home turns a condemned man's dream into something quietly devastating.

He also got to Dolly Parton's In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad) months before she released her own version, proof of an ear as sharp as his pen.

This is Bakersfield country at its finest, lean and plain-spoken and built to last. Few records belong on a country shelf more.