Top 20 Merle Haggard Songs: The Way I Am (#3)

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The top three! This is the cream of the cream of the crop of Merle Haggard songs. There are great, and really great, but these are the three I'd take to a deserted island with me. #3: The Way I Am This is so thematically like many other Hag songs that it's quite a shock to discover that he didn't write it. It was written, instead, by Sonny Throckmorton, who also wrote the Oak Ridge Boys' "Trying to Love Two Women" and T.G. Sheppard's hit "Last Cheater's Waltz." This is similar to "Big City" in that it speaks of getting away from the day-to-day grind. Instead of the defiant "get me out of here" of "Big City," in "The Way I Am" Haggard delivers Throckmorton's lyrics, echoing the way most of us feel while staring at the beach picture on the calendar at our desks at work: "Wish I was down on some blue bayou with a bamboo cane stuck in the sand...so I'll just dream and keep on being the way I am." Maybe "Big City" is an "answer of sorts" to this song. Here he laments, "The way I am don't fit my shackles," while in "Big City" he shakes off those shackles ("keep your retirement and your so-called 'social security'"). As most of us don't have the gonads to tell the "Big City" to "turn me loose and set me free," we, too, just dream and keep on being the way we are. Sonny Throckmorton, you wrote my life; and Merle Haggard, you sang it. The Way I Am Written by Sonny Throckmorton From The Way I Am, 1980