“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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I somehow always knew this song but never really paid attention to the lyrics. Country music is always best when it tells a story but in a very simplistic, conversational manner (Merle, Dolly, Tom T. etc). Great song. “A-“
Ditto for me. I’d heard the song before but after the familiar tropes of prison life early on, I must have tuned out or failed to process the pivot that he was really a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Powerful stuff and I’m glad someone set me straight about this one.
There was only one Merle Haggard and he was among the best (and often the very best) at any topic he tackled. I had several friends whose fathers were POWs so the song had special meaning for me.
Merle is a master at helping us feel others people’s pain while taking the listener along on the narrator’s memory trip from labour camps to Kern River to prisoner of war camps in Vietnam.
As much as his songwriting is rightly celebrated, his skills as vocalist are without peer.
I wore out the boxset “Down Every Road” when it was released in 1996.
A brilliant and beautiful song.
The fact that this song is mostly forgotten about in Haggard’s discography is both a shame and a testament to how many incredible songs he had that many were overlooked in retrospect. What a beautiful performance.