Boy Behind Bars: Portrait of Merle Haggard as a Young Delinquent: The remix and the research (not due yet)
Categories: Merle Haggard, Bakersfield sound stars
Tags: personality theories Merle Haggard scientific writing Boy Behind Bars
Today we're mixing the remix with the research as we study Merle Haggard during the course of his troubled youth. If you've just come from:
Psychology Comes Alive
..then you'll have familiarized yourself with the relationship between frontal lobe dysfunction and violent and criminal behavior, or as they say in England and Canada, "behaviour," eh? And if you responded to the discussion over there with the intelligentia/cognoscenti, then you'll have already had ample opportunity to critique the article according to the highest possible standards or scholarly scientific writing, and you will have had a chance to discuss Merle Haggard's youthful indiscretions from a neuropsychological/neuropsychiatric perspective.
In this blog, the BSU blog, you'll get a chance to shake off your neuropsychological/neuropsychiatric skin and study possible diacritical environmental antecedents deemed to be etiologically related to Merle's youthful display of recalcitrance. So kick back, listen to this latest mix of Boy Behind Bars (Portrait of Merle Haggard as a Young Delinquent). Then offer an hypothesis concerning the possible confluence of personality and environmental factors that may have contributed to Merle's recalcitrant youth. For example, one might postulate that it was the combination of Merle's "moving against" personality (Karen Horney), grief over the loss of his father, and the lack of a male role model to offer guidance, structure and discipline that contributed to his problematic behavior as a youngster.
And if you're visiting BSU from the school of hard knocks, don't be intimidated by all the highfalutin psychobabble. Deep inside, we're all hillbillies. Don't feel that you're persona non grata (not worth a crap) just because you don't use the same language as others who visit and offer comments here. I always tell folks I'm just trailer trash with an education. Just tell me what you think of the new remix, and talk about why you think Merle was so hell-bent on breaking the law in his youth.
Boy Behind Bars (Portrait of Merle Haggard as a Young Delinquent)
words and music by Dr BLT copyright 2009
Boy Behind Bars remix sample
boy behind bars
born in a boxcar home in Bakersfield
lost your dad
when you were 9 years of age
is that what fueled
all the rage you feel
boy behind bars, boy behind bars,
boy behind bars, boy behind bars
and boxcars
boy behind bars
that describes Merle Haggard as a teen
fueled by rage, grief and pain
does that explain the places you have been
boy behind bars, boy behind bars,
boy behind bars, boy behind bars
and boxcars
from Bakersfield to Texas
and everywhere in between
runni' away
gettin' locked up
stealin' everything you see
you spent some time in PSI
one year for larceny
with Bob Teague as your partner
right around the age of 15
boy behind bars, boy behind bars,
boy behind bars, boy behind bars
and boxcars
a boxcar limosine
just like your home on wheels
well you lived to cause a scene
eventually, well, you'd end up
with a botched up robbery
locked up in San Quinten
waitin' to be freed
boy behind bars, boy behind bars,
boy behind bars, boy behind bars
and boxcars
step to the left
step to the right
gonna be a brawl
there's gonna be a fight
'till Johnny Cash
turned you around
now you sing a new song
and you're makin' new sounds
boy behind bars, boy behind bars,
boy behind bars, boy behind bars
and boxcars (repeat)
I didn’t see the article about neuropsychological studies at psychologycomesalive.com yet, so I looked up some key words and phrases you (Dr. BLT) used in the above article. The first thing I needed to look up was the word “recalcitrant” (I didn’t have a clue). Recalcitrant, it turns out, is synonymous with the word rebellious. Judging by the facts I then dug up about Merle Haggard, I would say he was definitely recalcitrant; he was caught shoplifting at age 13, arrested at age 14 for truancy and petty larceny, while still in his teens he was arrested again for physically assaulting another boy during an attempted burglary, arrested again in 1957 for robbery, supposedly ran a gambling and Hooch (fermented fruit/bread wine) racket from his cell in San Quentin prison, and that’s just the mischief he got caught for. After further research into Merles early years (and reading the Doc’s comment) my earlier assumptions have been confirmed that Merle is an aggressive personality type (moving against). At least it seems like he was in his rowdy youth. Perhaps music has mellowed the recalcitrant beast.
To be honest, I had to look up just about all of this line; “neuropsychological/neuropsychiatric skin and study possible diacritical environmental antecedents deemed to be etiologically related to Merle's youthful display of recalcitrance”.
These were my results:
Studies have shown that overly aggressive behavior and focal orbitofrontal lobe injuries are closely associated. Deficits in frontal executive function have shown to increase aggressive behavior, but studies have been somewhat inconsistent as far as their ability to prove there is a connection between violent crime and frontal network dysfunction. There have been more conclusive results though, pertaining to the connection between focal prefrontal damage and a more impulsive subtype of aggressive behavior.
I looked up “diacritical” and “antecedent” and I’m still not certain what they mean in connection to the rest of the sentence (maybe you could explain it to me next class). Ok, “etiology”, that one I got. Etiology is the study of what causes a particular thing to happen, so in relation to the Doc’s sentence; he is asking what may have been the causes behind Merles aggressively rebellious behaviors. The Dr’s question is not difficult to answer when you look at Merles biography and see that he grew up during the great depression, was up rooted from his hometown and relocated in a strange new city (Bakersfield), and lost his father to the grim reaper when he was only 9 years old.
Still, I couldn’t find any information in regards to Merle Haggard incurring any head injuries but I did find an article about his son, Marty Haggard, getting into a serious car accident and receiving head injuries that caused memory loss, difficulties with motor skills (nothing to do with working on cars) and various other related symptoms of head injuries.
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About the song:
I was digging the groove of the song (Boy Behind Bars); I am curious how you remixed it. I agree with the lyrics when you allude to Merle losing his father at the age of nine being etiologically related to his aggressive personality. I really like the line “ boxcar limousine” and the reference to Merle being in the audience (as a prisoner) when Johnny Cash played a gig at San Quentin, and his subsequent turn around from a life of crime to a life of rhyme.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but did Merle Haggard suffer frontal lobe damage? I didn't see anything about that in the blog, so I'm not sure how to make a connection between the article and Haggard. I can definitely see where losing one's father at a young rage can cause a great deal of repressed rage, but I don't know that it's an excuse to become a criminal. Now, if in fact there was frontal lobe damage, that would offer more of a reasonable explanation about why his early life turned out the way it did.
The thing is, he seemed to turn his life completely around later on(based on what I've heard from you in class), so the possibility of any type of severe frontal lobe damage is far less likely, although not impossible. As indicated in the journal article, there are cases of people with frontal lobe damage who have recovered, although it's extremely rare.
I would need to know more about Haggard's background to be able to determine whether or not his father's death would have been the major contributing factor in his early criminal activities; however, I must point out that many people lose one or more parents at a young age and not all of them commit crimes, so I suspect there is quite a bit more to the story than that.
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