You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Wheeler's paper is a scholarly and soulful inquiry into the iterative relationship between Merle Haggard's struggle to find his way through life and his artistic quest. The paper explores the roots, the meaning, and the working through of personal challenges through Haggard's songwriting and performing, aptly applying psychoanalytic perspectives on development and adaptation to traumatic loss. His analysis follows from biographical and autobiographical accounts of Haggard's life placed in relation to the lyrics of his songs. Dr. Wheeler's approach to the music focuses on the poetry of the lyrics, employing the same kind of scholarly textual analysis that has characterized his considerations of the works of Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, and others. Here, I would like to add to what Dr. Wheeler has offered us, first, in regard to the reactions of young Merle to the painful loss of his father and the ambivalent attachment to his mother. Then, I will focus on my more major theme—what we may learn by looking beyond the lyrics, in appreciation of the music, itself.
My own disclaimer is that I am not a country music guy. But I love music of all kinds and subscribe to Duke Ellington's typology1— “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind” (1962/1995, p. 326). Further, irrespective of genre, attention to a special place for music in any person's life engages my long-standing interest in psychoanalytic perspectives on how music, dance, and many other manners of movement are associated with self-states, affect, and the feeling of what happens, on one's own and in relational transactions.
I grew up with the drumbeat of the Chicago blues in the background, with rock music of the 50s, 60s, and 70s that