Haggard had scored four number one hits in the previous two years with prison songs or crime-related themes, including "I'm a Lonesome Fugitive", "Branded Man", "Sing Me Back Home", and "The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde", and the singer continued his domination of the country charts with the self-penned "Mama Tried," a song in which the narrator laments the pain and suffering he caused his mother by going to prison "despite all my Sunday learnin'..." Along with "Sing Me Back Home" and "Okie from Muskogee," it is probably the song most closely identified with Haggard. The story was partly autobiographical, and the fact that Haggard had actually spent two years in San Quentin gives the song an authenticity that makes the lyric sound all the more heartfelt. "Mama Tried" hit #1 in August 1968 and stayed there for a month. It would also be featured that fall in the Dick Clark production The Killers Three, a film in which Haggard ironically plays a lawman. Although it isn't necessarily a concept album, Mama Tried is dominated with prison songs, including the Porter Wagoner hit "Green, Green Grass of Home," Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," and the Mel Tillis original "I Could Have Gone Right," where Haggard once again pleads his mother's forgiveness. Haggard also recorded the Dolly Parton composition "In the Good Old Days " several months before Parton cut it herself. As detailed in the liner notes to the 1994 Haggard retrospective Down Every Road, "It was Bonnie who brought the song to Merle's attention when the two of them did a short tour with Dolly and Porter Wagoner. Relaxing on Merle's bus one day, the guys were up front playing poker while Dolly and Bonnie hung out in back. 'She sang to me all night long,' Bonnie says, 'songs that she'd written..." As he had on his previous LP The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde, Haggard also included songs written by Dallas Frazier and Leon Payne. The album cover is one of Haggard's most memorable, showing him dressed in a prison uniform sadly strumming a guitar.
Reissues
In 1996, Mama Tried was reissued by BGO Records along with I'm a Lonesome Fugitive.
Mama Tried continued Haggard's artistic and commercial hot streak, reaching number 4 on Billboard's country albums chart. In the original Rolling Stone review, Andy Wickham wrote, "His songs romanticize the hardships and tragedies of America's transient proletarian and his success is resultant of his inherent ability to relate to his audience a commonplace experience with precisely the right emotional pitch...Merle Haggard looks the part and sounds the part because he is the part. He's great." In 2013, Haggard biographer David Cantwell observed that "Mama Tried" had "the potential to reach beyond the country audience that went unrealized, at least in Merle's version, and the whole album has pop ambition unusual for a late-Sixties country release." Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote: "While 'Mama Tried' stands out among Haggard's original material, 'I'll Always Know' and 'You'll Never Love Me Now' are both solid songs." The song "Mama Tried" won the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999.
