Merle Haggard”Same Train, A Different Time” (1969)...

Merle Haggard

“Same Train, A Different Time” (1969)

Koch

With last night’s Academy of Country Music Awards show over, and yet another round of honors doled out more for sales than soul, here’s a humble suggestion. At future country awards, from Grammys to CMA to Music City News, all winners should be handed a copy of this album, Haggard’s tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, the man known as “The Father of Country Music,” along with whatever gilt-edged statuette they pick up.

This double album, long out of print and just recently issued on a single CD, is a magnificent object lesson in the essence of country songwriting and singing.

Such is the current emphasis on new faces in country that Haggard’s old label, Capitol, left it to a small independent company to reissue the album. It’s a shame, though Capitol’s loss is Koch’s coup: These songs, and Haggard’s uniformly skilled interpretations, will survive long after 98% of today’s freshman class has been forgotten.

What Rodgers did when he came out of Meridian, Miss., to be country’s first star, was to put a stamp of individuality on country music that hadn’t much existed before he started recording in the 1920s. He wrote his own songs and sang them with a uniquely soulful voice usually accented by his signature yodeling.

Those songs spoke of places and people that still provide the raw materials of country music. The out of luck, out of love and out of work were sketched in small towns or cross-country treks as they struggled to remedy, or at least understand, their situations.

Haggard, himself one of country’s greatest songwriters, sings them with unadulterated purity of voice, completely capturing the characters’ worries, yearnings and heartaches.

This was the first of several tribute albums Haggard has made in his long career. It was largely ignored because it was released about the time his breakthrough “Okie From Muskogee” single came out and captured national attention.

But in paying his respects to the man to whom every country singer still owes an incalculable debt, the Hag made what is quite possibly the most heartfelt of all.