By Bob Doerschuk

© 2008 CMA Close Up News Service / Country Music Association, Inc.

For more than 10 years, Country Music Hall of Fame member Merle Haggard has been thinking about recording a bluegrass album. Then on Oct. 2, 2007, McCoury Music released Haggard's The Bluegrass Sessions, showcasing somewhat surprising fruits of his ambition.

After all, these performances don't rocket along on banjo-driven, Scruggs-style adrenaline. No tenor harmonies soar over the instrumental foundation. Only one of its 12 songs, "Blues Stay Away from Me," stems from the genre's standard repertoire; the rest, aside from a Jimmie Rodgers medley, comes from Haggard's catalog.

The question may be whether this is really a bluegrass album at all. "Well, I've thought about that several times," Haggard, the 1970 CMA Entertainer of the Year, admitted. "It's a good question. It's certainly worth answering, and I don't know if I'm qualified to answer it. So I'm going to let the people decide what they think."

The will of the people has been important to Haggard, composer of "Workin' Man Blues" and other hymns to the wisdom and strength of blue-collar America. Parsing his music into one or another category is less of a priority. Certainly it was far from his mind when Haggard and a group of all-star musicians gathered for two days at Ricky Skaggs' studio near Nashville to cut these tracks.

"We could have gone deeper into bluegrass," he reflected. "We could have put harmony on it, because we had good harmony singers all around us. We could have done this and we could have done that. But there's no way to change me. I'm 70 years old, so Merle Haggard just went down there with some good bluegrass pickers and made an album. It was a three-way choice between Ronnie, Marty and me to leave it alone, because what we were playing was so fresh and unrehearsed. And that's the result, right there."

Ronnie Reno and Marty Stuart were among the musicians on The Bluegrass Sessions, along with younger players who also boast strong bluegrass credentials. Some of them were strangers to Haggard; Reno, however, had been a Stranger for nine years, an experience that coupled with the deep bluegrass lineage of his family to put him in a key position on this album.

"When I was with The Strangers, from 1972 through '81, Merle was playing the fiddle a lot," said Reno. "Of course, he played a lot like Bob Wills at that time, but he knew a lot of old breakdowns, which I also knew from bluegrass. So we'd play them as we were going down the road on his bus, and we'd get into singing songs like 'Molly and Tenbrooks 'or 'Love, Please Come Home.' We talked a lot about the earlier years, when he used to listen to my dad, Don Reno, and his partner Red Smiley on the radio."

"Ronnie was working with Sonny and Bobby Osborne when I hired him," Haggard remembered. "I learned a lot about bluegrass from Ronnie, about the inside of it. So when the time finally got right to do this album, I called him. And it took off right then."

Aside from asking him to invite Stuart to join them, Haggard left it up to Reno to put the band together and work out the logistics. Early in this process, it became clear that a by-the-book bluegrass approach was not the likely outcome. "We went through several attempts to pick some material," Reno said, "but it always kept going back to new songs that Merle was writing."

"We thought about confining ourselves to the standards," Haggard added, "but it just didn't make much sense to us. I'm Merle Haggard, that's bluegrass music, and why can't it be new? So we just picked a bunch of songs that I had."

They settled on a mix of classic and new works. "Big City" made the cut in part because Haggard enjoyed the bluegrass-flavored version that Iris DeMent contributed to the Haggard tribute album, Tulare Dust: A Songwriter's Tribute to Merle Haggard. "Hungry Eyes" is there too, with poignant chorus harmonies added by Alison Krauss. Highlights from the new compositions include "Pray," a waltz-time meditation on love that Haggard wrote with his wife Theresa while reconciling after an argument, and "What Happened," a funny/sad reflection on America's loss of innocence.

"I wrote that one a couple of years ago, after taking my wife to the hospital over the Christmas holidays," he said. "I was driving back home from the Bay Area in my Hummer when a real fierce storm hit on Interstate 5. I had to negotiate this hurricane with trucks all around me and a cross wind of 60 or 70 miles an hour when this song hit me. It took me three hours to wrassle that song in the midst of this storm. Songwriters never know when something great will come by. When it does, you don't want to miss it."

Haggard showed up at the studio late in the morning with his list of songs, his guitar and trust that Reno had put the right combination of players together. It didn't take long after that for everyone to connect, though it took a little creative arrangement to make that happen.

"Merle just put everybody at ease when he came into the studio, sat down and said, 'This is one I want to do,'" dobro player Rob Ickes said. "It was 'Pray.' He sang a little bit of it and it was perfect. Then Marty said, 'How about this?' He played this awesome mandolin kickoff and everything fell into place."

The excitement level was high after that, as everyone scattered into their isolation booths to lay down their first track. It's not clear now what that song was, because right off the bat something didn't feel right. That energy they had felt while playing in the same room wasn't so easy to tap with everyone out of sight and separated from each other.

Then Stuart had an idea. "He said, 'Hey, get that mic back out there in the middle of the floor. Let's circle around out there and see what happens.' That's what we did," Haggard recalled. "I got to the end of the circle and we played those tunes, just like we were in your front room. There were no overdubs, none of that crap. It was all live. There were little warts here and there, but we played the best we could play and it felt good to us."

From that point, The Bluegrass Sessions became less about evoking a style of music and more about letting the creative process happen as it would, without preconception. Even so, Reno insists that the heart if not the letter of this music is pure bluegrass. "A good bluegrass band will put a little drive in their music," he said. "Once Merle sets the tempo, he does that same thing with his voice. So I knew that these players would accommodate that for him and even put a little more energy into it."

Bluegrass giant Del McCoury, who released The Bluegrass Sessions as the third album on his McCoury Music label, agrees. "Is this a bluegrass album? Well, it is Merle, isn't it?" he said, chuckling. "It doesn't matter what kind of band it is. Just listen to this great singer and his great songs. Really, that's what it comes down to."

On the Web: www.merlehaggard.com