The song is “Mama Tried.” Merle Haggard released it in July 1968, it spent four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart, and it became the biggest hit he’d had up to that point. In 2015, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. But the story starts long before the studio, with a widowed mother and a restless boy.
A mother who rode the bus for 27 years
Merle Haggard was 9 when his father died. Years later, he told American Songwriter he didn’t suppose he had ever gotten over it. His mother was left to raise the family alone. She had a good education but had never been able to use it, so she went to work as a bookkeeper at a meat company. She didn’t drive. For 27 years, she rode a city bus.
She was a devout churchgoer, and her youngest son gave her more trouble than she could handle. Haggard first ran away at 11, chasing the freight-train life he heard about in Jimmie Rodgers songs. He was first locked up at 13. Reform schools and local jails followed, and by 20 he was in San Quentin.
The New Year’s Day show
While Merle Haggard was serving his time, Johnny Cash came to San Quentin on New Year’s Day and played for the inmates. Haggard was in the crowd. He later said he hadn’t been much of a Cash fan before that show, but it pushed him toward music, and he joined the prison’s country band.
After his parole in 1960, Haggard tried for years to keep his record quiet. He long said it was a conversation with Cash, in which it came out that he’d been in that San Quentin audience, that convinced him to stop hiding it. The two men later restaged that exchange on Cash’s ABC television show in 1969.
Written on a bus, cut in one take
Merle Haggard didn’t write “Mama Tried” in prison. He told American Songwriter he wrote nothing behind those walls worth recording. The song came after he was free, on the bottom bunk of a bus. Once he had the first line, the rest came so quickly that he worried he was too close to it to judge it.
He cut it in 1968 at Capitol Records in Hollywood, in a morning session that had to wrap by 1 p.m., with Ken Nelson and Fuzzy Owen producing. James Burton opened the record finger-picking a dobro, and Glen Campbell played rhythm guitar and sang tenor harmony alongside Bonnie Owens. Haggard said the band played live in the room and got it in one take.
The one line that isn’t true
The song’s narrator turns 21 in prison serving life without parole. Haggard really was in prison at 21. The life sentence was invented, and he said so plainly:
“I didn’t get life without parole, though, that’s the only line that isn’t factual.”
Fans who know the story will notice the sources don’t agree on the year of that Cash show. Some put it on January 1, 1958; Rolling Stone and others say January 1, 1959. Either way, about a decade passed between Haggard sitting in that audience and “Mama Tried” reaching No. 1.
A Lincoln, or a Dodge Dart
When Merle Haggard played the finished song for his mother, the shy woman who had ridden the bus all those years told him the ladies at church would tease her about it. He offered to buy her a Lincoln with his first royalty check. She turned it down, worried the same ladies would make fun of a Lincoln too, and asked for a Dodge Dart instead.
Decades later, Haggard said it seemed to him the song had always been there. The first thing he wanted to do with its money was buy something for the woman in it, and she would only accept a car modest enough not to embarrass her at church.
Do you remember where you were the first time you heard “Mama Tried”?