Sony
1981
Big City
About This Album
When Merle Haggard & the Strangers, along with producer Lewis Talley, entered a recording studio in July of 1981 to make his debut album for Epic -- after leaving his long association with MCA -- he had no idea that just 48 hours later he and the band would leave, having recorded enough material for two albums, Big City and its follow-up, Going Where the Lonely Go. Big City is a collection of songs focused on the themes of freedom from urban life. Haggard wrote or co-wrote almost every song on the record -- except "Texas Fiddle Song," written by his then-wife, Leona William -- and the free abandon the band plays with here stands in sharp contrast to the material featured on the latter album. Big City, both the cut and the album, revisits the seemingly eternal themes in Haggard's best work -- the plight of the honest, decent working man amid the squalor, complication, and contradiction of urban life. Besides the title cut, there are bona fide Haggard classics here -- and some that aren't but should be. The obvious ones were part of his shows in his fourth decade as a bona fide country legend: "My Favorite Memory" (one of the most beautifully sung and arranged moments of his long career), "Stop the World and Let Me Off," and "Are the Good Times Really Over for Good (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver)" (an elegiac tome that reveals with resignation and disappointment -- as well as some enlightenment -- what was spouted off anthemically in "The Fightin' Side of Me" or "Rainbow Stew" nearly 20 years earlier).
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,8 and 11)

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