15 Songs | MR032 | Release Date 2007

Perhaps the first thing you need to grasp is that Jason Morphew's Holding Merle Haggard (Max Recordings) is an album, not a CD - vinyl, baby, and no excuses. And it's good vinyl: the thick kind that won't warp the first time your air conditioner dies.

Furthermore, the lion's share of this album is just a voice and a guitar, and neither one is always in tune. This is a record to play in the dark, out on the porch in the sultry heat of summer. Alcohol and cigarettes likely would not hurt the experience.

Morphew is well known and highly regarded within the singer-songwriter ranks of Arkansas. Two of his earlier CDs, The Duke of Arkansas and Sunday Afternoon, are critically acclaimed, brilliant testimonies to his songwriting prowess and hisability to take an ordinary, even awkward, voice and render it unique through the sheer force of words and music.

Holding Merle Haggard came before all that, when Morphew was a 22-two-year-old, heartbroken soul trying to cram the pain of his world into the four-track cassette recorder his wise father had given him for Christmas. Granted, plenty of young singers have poured their cliche-riddled hearts into countless recorders, but what separates Morphew from the crowd is a stunning combination of raw lyricism and a real sense of narrative.

Clearly, even before he went off on his current California journey to study literature and creative writing in the formal setting of the University of California-Davis, this kid could write.

Holding Merle Haggard is the story of a "straight young Arkie couple who love Merle's music and make a pilgrimage to Bakersfield to see him perform; Merle spots the woman in the audience, invites the couplebackstage; the woman boards Merle's tour bus and rides away with him ..."

From the moment Morphew sings, "... she rode out past the rotting farms / She's in a mansion on Lake Shasta / holding Merle Haggard in her arms," you may as well give it up. Your evening is shot to hell. Morphew is going to make you as sad as a young man in his grandfather's old suit standing in a withered graveyard. However, you'll feel better when it's all said and done, after listening to great song after great song by a young man with an old soul.

Unfortunately, due to society's incoherent and misinformed bias against some Anglo-Saxon words, a few of the best lines on this record cannot be reprinted in a newspaper, but "Waiting for the Irony" says more about sex and relationships than any 22-year-old ought to know.

A cassette version of the music was released in 1995. Little Rock's Max Recordings is responsible for this exquisite rerelease on vinyl, with original liner notes, four extra tracks (including the amazing "Momma Was a Beauty Queen"), and a gorgeous cover portrait of Haggard by Baxter Knowlton. Currently, the album can be obtained at either jasonmorphew.com or maxrecordings.com.

In an age of musical cherrypicking, where the idea of listening to an entire CD has given way to iTunes, here is one album you can listen to from beginning to end, and when you are finished, you will feel like you just read a good book.

by BY MARCK L. BEGGS SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE (July 1, 2007)

Marck L. Beggs is the editor of the Arkansas Literary Forum (www.hsu.edu/ alf) and dean of the Graduate School at Henderson State University.