“I Wonder if They Ever Think of Me”
Merle Haggard
Written by Merle Haggard
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
February 17, 1973
Merle Haggard does something extraordinary here.
By this point of his career, he’d cultivated so much empathy for prisoners that the listener assumes that the protagonist of this hit must be in jail somewhere in America.
The devastating reveal that he’s a prisoner of war in Vietnam flooded me with memories of the POW MIA flags my veteran father flew so many of during his lifetime.
It’s worth noting that this song topped the charts only weeks before the last of our prisoners of war in Vietnam were released, which adds to its poignancy. Haggard further validates his place as the greatest man in the history of the genre with this underrated classic.
“I Wonder if They Ever Think of Me” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies
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