I’ve got to admit, this playlist may tell you as much about me as it does about Merle. As you may notice, it’s a little on the melancholy side. But if you listen to these songs, you’ll catch a lot of the range and depth of Merle’s music, right down to “Footlights,” the personal confession at the end, perhaps as profound

a statement of personal disenchantment as one is likely to encounter in popular song. But that’s not all – nostalgia, history, social activism, desperate love and desperate faith, they’re all represented here, along with such familiar but never less than freshly felt songs as “Mama Tried” and “Mama’s Hungry Eyes.” And that’s not even taking into account Merle’s classic romantic ballad, “Today I Started Loving You Again,” written with uncharacteristic emotional openness with his then-wife (and forever musical partner), Bonnie Owens. There’s so much yearning in so many of these songs, a yearning fully sustained in one of the few songs here not written by Merle, Blaze Foley’s “If I could Only Fly.” I just wish I could have included “It’s Too Late for Me,” his duet with Peter Wolf on Peter’s album, Midnight Souvenirs, which fully lives up to its title. And when you’re done listening to these songs, go immediately to YouTube for Merle’s last song, “Kern River Blues,” recorded less than two months before he died. It’ll kill you.