Mama Tried

Haggard wrote "Mama Tried" and recorded it on May 9, 1968, with Ken Nelson producing, for Capitol; it was released as a single on July 22, 1968, the title track and first single of the album, backed with "You'll Never Love Me Now", and spent four weeks at number one on the Billboard country singles chart from August 1968, the Strangers' fifth number one. He told Paul Zollo of American Songwriter in 2020 that he wrote it on the bottom bunk of a bus, that it almost wrote itself and he worried it was too easy, and that his mother had done everything right, so the song does not blame her; the only untrue line, he said, is the one about a life sentence without parole. His mother rode a city bus for 27 years, and when she heard it she said the church ladies would tease her; when he offered her a Lincoln she asked for a Dodge Dart.

He remembered the session as one live take on a morning at Capitol in Hollywood, aiming for a sound in between Peter, Paul and Mary and Johnny Cash; James Burton opened on fingerpicked dobro, with Bonnie Owens and Glen Campbell on harmony, Campbell on rhythm guitar, Jerry Ward on bass and Norman Hamlet on steel. He gave the length as 2:16 against the 2:12 on the record, saying songs for radio had to be under three minutes. The drummer is Jimmy Gordon in his account and Eddie Burris on Wikipedia's album page.

It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry (as part of the 2015 class, in the Library's own account) and, in 2021, Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs at number 376. The Library's essay by Rachel Rubin calls it a path-breaking song in several significant ways, noting its urban-sounding instrumental introduction, vernacular language and internal and feminine rhymes. Setlist.fm lists it 201 times across his setlists, second only to "Okie from Muskogee" (219). The Grateful Dead played it more than 300 times between 1969 and 1995 by one count, and other sources give 327. Whether our upload is the studio record or a live take is not known.