November 29, 2024 —– Chart #274
Hello Music Friends,
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Chart of the Week. Been doing quite a bit of country lately and today we have another one from a great artist. That’s the Way Love Goes is the thirty-eighth studio album by the American country music singer Merle Haggard backed by The Strangers, released in 1983. Haggard had loved Lefty Frizzell’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” since he first heard the song and tried recording it towards the end of his time with Capitol Records in the mid-1970s with unsatisfactory results. That version, which can be found on the box set Hag: The Studio Recordings 1969-1976, is more lighthearted and whimsical than the one Haggard recorded in 1983. The song topped the Billboard country singles chart, as did “Someday When Things Are Good,” a song co-written by Haggard and his wife Leona Williams. It also proved to be prophetic, as the couple divorced that year. Williams had also written Haggard’s recent hit “You Take Me For Granted”, but Williams, who replaced Haggard’s previous wife Bonnie Owens in the Strangers, had creative aspirations of her own that her husband did not always appreciate.
As Haggard wrote in his 1981 autobiography Sing Me Back Home, “I’d reached the point in my career where I felt in charge of my music…When Leona tried to make a suggestion, I resented it. She resented my resentment. So it went. She kept saying she felt like an outsider…I couldn’t understand why she got so upset by the press leaning toward good ol’ Bonnie and the snide remarks about Leona coming in and breaking up my ‘happy home.'” The divorce instigated a personal landslide for Haggard, who spent the rest of the decade losing himself in alcohol and drugs, although initially it did not prevent him from having #1 hits. As he recalled in his 1999 autobiography House of Memories, “I roared right through the 1980s, running and drugging the nights away, making bad decisions while under the influence of various substances.” That’s The Way Love Goes was his third hit LP for Epic in two years, not counting two separate duet albums with George Jones and Willie Nelson. While discussing his own song “Bad Boy” in the liner notes to Great Days: The John Prine Anthology, John Prine admitted, “Around that time, I fell under the spell of Merle Haggard’s songwriting. There was a period when he seemed to be churning out some really great stuff. He was bringing out great albums every six or eight months, and I considered ‘Bad Boy’ sort of in the vein of what he was doing.”
Overall, That’s The Way Love Goes offers a more laid back feel than Haggard’s later LPs, demonstrating his emotive vocal range on several ballads like “What Am I Gonna Do (With the Rest of My Life)”, which peaked at number 3 and appears to reflect the turmoil with Williams, as does the lilting yet bitter “If You Hated Me”. Other tracks have the bright pop sound that was becoming more predominate on country albums in the 1980s, such as “I’m Carrying Fire” and the jazzy “The Last Boat of the Day”. The album’s closing track, “I Think I’ll Stay”, sounds like an after hours blues jam as Haggard croons, “Think I’ll stay around till I’m sick of home sweet home…” The album peaked at number 8 on the Billboard country albums chart.
For those of you who are not country fans, I am sorry for that. But I promise I will get back into some more rock and American folk music in future posts. Fair warning, I still love plenty of great country songs so get used to the variety! Have fun and sing along.
Keep Rockin’,
Stan Bradshaw