Merle Haggard
Back to the Barrooms Again
Musicians
“Back to the Barrooms Again” was co-written by Merle Haggard and Dave Kirby and first recorded by Haggard in 1980 as part of his 31st studio album, also titled Back to the Barrooms, released in October of that year on MCA Records. The album marked one of Haggard’s productive late-1970s/early-1980s creative peaks, with songs that sat firmly in the honky-tonk country tradition that had defined Haggard’s working repertoire from the start.
The song’s premise is among Haggard’s most direct: the singer, having tried marriage and home life, has decided to give up and return to the barrooms where he started. The unsentimental narrative arc and the plain-spoken acceptance of the singer’s preference for the bar over domestic stability give the song the kind of unfussy emotional honesty that defined Haggard’s writing. Dave Kirby, Haggard’s co-writer, was a Nashville-based country songwriter who collaborated on a number of Haggard compositions during this period.
“Back to the Barrooms Again” was released as the B-side of “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” and didn’t quite chart in its own right, though it received split radio airplay alongside the A-side. The song crossed into the bluegrass repertoire through subsequent treatments by acts who carried Haggard material into the bluegrass canon, and it remains a regular at jam sessions where pickers want a Haggard-tradition honky-tonk piece with strong vocal melody and direct emotional posture.