Day #24 - Swinging Doors

I once had a guy tell me that he didn’t like country music because they were always singing about heartache, loosin’, boozin’, fightin’, gamblin’, or just plain misery. That’s precisely why I like it. Country is real. It’s raw. It’s storytelling. Sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes sappy, sometimes silly.

This Merle Haggard tune put a grin on my face the first time I heard it. The lyric takes a sardonic poke at the lady the narrator has left. Haggard wrote the title track of his 1966 album 56 years ago this month, just three years into his songwriting career. The song peaked at number 5. In August of the same year, from the same album, he released “The Bottle Let Me Down”, which peaked at number 3. In those two songs he covered at least two of the country music standard themes.

Merle Haggard was one of the best.