The acoustic lineup with a mandolin, banjo and fiddle seem to mark this as bluegrass enough to give the album its title, but The Bluegrass Sessions are really simply a platform for Haggard’s voice, which sounds good here. He clearly enjoys singing the blues, and he revives “Big City” and “Mama’s Hungry Eyes” for the occasion. But the album’s charm is undone by “What Happened?” Haggard wonders how the country got so crappy, and he sounds like an old crank when he sets The Andy Griffith Show against Howard Stern to show how the culture has fallen. Among the other sins are the evening news being full of lies and Wal-Marts replacing mom and pop stores, and he wonders if it’s all because we slept too long or got too high. The song reaches a breaking point when he asks, “Why did we raise the price of gasoline?” I don’t know about you, but I didn’t raise gas prices, and if Haggard doesn’t know why the oil companies raised prices, then he’s awfully hard to take seriously.

 

The song is so dumb-headed that it casts a shadow over the album. Either he isn’t that bright and doesn’t see the degree to which big business has worked to rig government in its favor at remarkable cost to the way of life we recognize, or he sees the answers and looks for ones he likes better. Whatever the case, the song feels like a lie, and taints everything else on the album. He advocates prayer on “Pray” with the same plainspoken voice that he reflects with on “Learning to Live with Myself,” but neither song sounds true after “What Happened?” Haggard’s politics have always been idiosyncratic, and it’s reassuring that he has generally been on the side of the working class, but as anyone who has ever gone through a break-up knows, once some things are said, everything said afterwards is heard relative to them. Here the song takes the edge off an otherwise fine return.