When the Bakersfield, California native brought the song to his record label, executives were reportedly appalled. As Jonathan Bernstein recounts in his online Rolling Stone article "Merle Haggard Reluctantly Unveils 'The Fightin' Side of Me'", "Hoping to distance himself from the harshly right-wing image he had accrued in the wake of the hippie-bashing "Muskogee," Haggard wanted to take a different direction and release "Irma Jackson" as his next single. Haggard had wanted to follow his hit " Okie from Muskogee" with the song but was advised not to by his record label. The album also contains " Irma Jackson," a song Merle describes in his preamble as his favorite "because it tells it like it is" but had remained unreleased because "the time wasn't right." The song tells the story of a doomed interracial romance between a white man and an African-American woman. The young voices heard on "Daddy Frank" are those of his daughter Dana and of his manager Fuzzy Owen's daughter Cindy. Haggard wed their story to that of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, who had moved from Alabama to California by boxcar during the Depression before forming their famous hillbilly boogie band. According to the liner notes to the 1994 box set Down Every Road, "Daddy Frank" derived from stories his wife Bonnie Owens had told him about her own mother, who had a hearing problem, and her father, who wasn't blind but loved to play harmonica. Compositionally, the album is split between Haggard originals and cover songs written by Collins, Wills, Red Foley and Joe Simpson, and also contains two #1 country hits, "Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)" and "Grandma Harp," both penned by Haggard. The album includes Haggard explaining the origins of each song with spoken introductions while praising the talents of those who inspired him, such as Tommy Collins and Bob Wills. The lead-off singles were " Grandma Harp" and " Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)" - both reached No. 7 on the Billboard Country album chart and #166 on the Pop album chart. Let Me Tell You About a Song is the fourteenth studio album by American country singer Merle Haggard and The Strangers, released in 1972. Merle Haggard and The Strangers chronology
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