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Merle Haggard died nearly six years ago at the age of 79 to be exact, on his seventy-ninth birthday. Haggard is finally the subject of a full-scale biography The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard, by Marc Eliot. Mark Pulliam reviewed it last week at Law and Liberty in the excellent column Our redneck poet. He expand upon Eliot’s respectful (but not hagiographic) treatment of
in the first words of this couplet:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
A poignant sentiment but let me acknowledge that I’m not a big Goldsmith fan. My own preferences in verse run more toward Merle Haggard, whose country music hits include the following lyric from his 1982 song “Are the Good Times Really Over?”:
Is the best of the free life behind us now
And are the good times really over for good?
I wonder, though: Is it possible that the insights of an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish novelist-poet and a twentieth-century American singer-songwriter, each reflecting on a common theme of decadence and each served up with a dollop of nostalgia, just might intersect?