Carlo Rotella: Misery and Gym 4/28

Merle Haggard has a new album out, and it's getting a lot of respectful attention, which is only his due as a grand old man of American music. It reminds me that I owe him a special debt of gratitude all my own: back when my daughters were in preschool and kindergarten, he saved me from Raffi.

I'm not one of those parents who wants his kids to listen to cool music. I'm fine with the Hokey Pokey, if the Hokey Pokey is what they want to hear. But there's something that wears on me in the aggressive gentleness, the self-congratulatory developmental harmlessness of most music marketed to the parents of small children. I realize the failing's in me, not the music, but I can't take it.

So Raffi got into my household somehow, through a babysitter or a relative, and the kids started wanting to hear him when we went anywhere in the car. I had to do something.

I turned to Merle Haggard's gigantic repertoire of short, unfussy country songs that evoke strong but not desperate emotional states, all delivered at a leisurely pace and with clear enunciation in a confident, textured storytelling voice. It worked like a charm. Soon the girls in their car seats were joining Merle in praying for rain in California so the grapes can grow and they can make more wine. Whenever we passed a business with a flashing neon sign, they would wonder aloud if he was inside. "Funny thing about Merle," a voice from the backseat once mused. "He's always in trouble."

A lot of what he had to say went right over their heads. One daughter sang, "Here I am again, mixing misery and gym," with no idea of what gin is, or why it goes so well with misery. Both of them joined in on the chorus of Mama Tried, singing about turning 21 in prison doing life without parole with only the vaguest sense that there's some kind of a really long adult time-out that can happen to you if you don't listen to your mother. Now that's music that teaches a wholesome and useful lesson.

In my household we're now safely past the Raffi period, and Merle Haggard's just one of a lot of singers they like, in all sorts of genres. But there was a crucial moment when it was all Merle all the time, and I'm eternally grateful to him. One more chorus of Raffi singing Robin in the Rain would have done me in, although now that I think of it, I'd like to hear Merle cover that song. There aren't many country singers who could carry off a line like "What a saucy fellow," but he could do it. He's got the gravitas that's come of mixing all that misery and gym over the years.