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Ballad From Merle Haggard's Muskogee Reissue Streaming Online

03/24/2014
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(Radio.com) A new double-CD reissue honoring the 45th anniversary of Merle Haggard's 1969 live album Okie from Muskogee is hitting stores this Tuesday (March 25). And today Radio.com has an exclusive preview of one of the album's songs, "Today, I Started Loving You Again".

This new reissue actually includes two albums: Okie from Muskogee and Haggard's followup album The Fightin' Side of Me, also recorded live and released a year later (see the full track listing). The version below of his composition "Today I Started Loving You Again" was released on the latter album, which was recorded in Philadelphia on Valentine's Day in 1970.

Haggard originally recorded the song (which initially went by the title "I Started Loving You Again") in 1968. He may have been best known at that point for snub-nosed songs like "Swinging Doors," "Branded Man" and "Mama Tried," but Haggard had already proven himself adept as a gentle balladeer, thanks to earlier recordings like "All of Me Belongs to You," "I Threw Away the Rose" and "You Don't Have Very Far to Go."

According to the Country Music Hall of Fame (of which he's been a member since 1994), Haggard's inspiration for the song came he had some down time from touring with his band and his then-wife Bonnie Owens.

"I took a deep breath and thought about my own feelings maybe for the first time in three months," Haggard recalled. "I looked at Bonnie and saw the exhaustion all over her face. She stared back, like people do when you look directly into their eyes. And I said, 'You know what? Today I started loving you again."

In the liner notes to the Haggard box set Down Every Road, Daniel Cooper wrote that Merle penned the song "on a paper sack in a hotel room in Dallas." Stream the song here.

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Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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