Merle Haggard

The post-Norah Jones phenomenon of standards albums by singers who don’t usually sing them has yielded the occasional alternate-universe proposition: Cyndi Lauper doing “La Vie en Rose”? Hey, middle-aged mothers just wanna have fun, too. Country vet Merle Haggard isn’t the least likely artist to rip through the Great American Songbook. (My vote? Queen Latifah–if she hadn’t just released the perfectly middlebrow The Dana Owens Album.) But on Unforgettable, Hag’s voice, a tarnished whiskey-sour croon with all manner of rough edges, doesn’t lend itself to easy piano-bar interpretations of “As Time Goes By” and “Pennies From Heaven.” This is a good thing: Too often we’re unable to hear anything in these songs beyond our collective memory of them–that’s the risk in establishing a canon. Yet Haggard gives these tunes a proud sense of experience that has less to do with the sophisticated facility of producer Freddy Powers’ smooth country-jazz settings and more to do with the sound of a man flipping through his back pages at a leisurely pace you couldn’t hurry if you tried.