Merle Haggard: hard times no bar to country music star
Merle Haggard, whose songs about the hardships of ordinary people put him in the pantheon of US country music, has died aged 79.
Merle Haggard, the former San Quentin inmate whose resonant baritone, songs about the hardships of ordinary people and devotion to the traditions of country music put him in the pantheon of American singer-songwriters, died on his 79th birthday at his ranch near Redding, California. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, he had suffered from double pneumonia since late last year.
Haggard released more than 200 albums including live, studio and compilations. He wrote about time-honored themes such as cheating spouses and whiskey, but many of his most memorable songs were about hobos, factory workers and people down on their luck. Such songs included Sing Me Back Home, I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am, Big City, Working Man’s Blues, and If We Make it Through December. One song, Today I Started Loving You Again, written with his third wife, Bonnie Owens, has been covered innumerable times by other artists.
As a 20-year-old father of two, he was convicted of second-degree burglary and escape and was sent to San Quentin. Haggard was in the audience when Johnny Cash came to the prison in 1959 and sang Folsom Prison Blues, a performance that he said inspired him to change his life.
The fiercely independent-minded Haggard was a blend of contradictions. He hewed to country’s roots as the commercial part of the genre often morphed into bland pop rock, and fought to memorialise traditional artists such as Bob Wills, Jimmie Rodgers and Lefty Frizzell. Yet more than any country artist he was embraced by the rock ’n’ roll world as the genres grew closer. Keith Richards, country rocker Gram Parsons and Bob Dylan were fans. His song Mama Tried was a Grateful Dead staple for years.
“Merle Haggard has always been as deep as deep gets,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2009. “Totally himself. Herculean. Even too big for Mount Rushmore. He definitely transcends the country genre.”
Haggard produced 38 No 1 country hits between 1966 and 1987 and stopped touring and recording only in recent months. He had bought a new bus — emblazoned, like his old one, with the words Santa Fe Super Chief — and continued to work on an album but had to cancel all his appearances in recent months.
Even when his music was no longer played on mainstream country radio, esteem for him grew as time passed and niches such as Americana, roots music and outlaw country expanded. Many of his songs were about the pain in his own life. He also often turned nostalgic as he sang in Are the Good Times Really Over?
The apogee of his fame came when Haggard, reluctant to be dragged into the Vietnam era’s culture wars, was unwillingly drafted as a political symbol by both conservatives and liberals. Of the more than 100 albums Haggard produced from the mid-1960s to the mid-80s, he is perhaps best known for a 1969 takedown of unpatriotic hippies, Okie From Muskogee, a spur-of-the-moment tune that Haggard co-wrote with Roy Edward Burris, the drummer in his band.
In Paul Hemphill’s book Good Old Boys, Haggard told the author that the song arose when they drove by a sign for Muskogee, Oklahoma, and someone on the bus said “I bet they don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.” They thought that was funny, and wrote the song in 20 minutes.
Okie was a polarising hit. Along with critics and fans, Haggard wound up parsing the song’s intent for years. He was shocked by the popular reaction: “Boy, I tell you, I didn’t know how strong some people thought about those things.” Later on, he told GQ magazine, “There are about 1700 ways to take that song.”
He wanted to follow Okie with a song called Irma Jackson about an interracial marriage. He was talked out of it by his handlers and instead recorded Fightin’ Side of Me (“When you’re runnin’ down our country, man, you’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me”). His career went into overdrive.
Haggard, known as “Hag”, said he was troubled by well-off college kids denouncing traditional American values and that being in prison had given him a special appreciation for the nation’s freedoms. He was celebrating small-town values. But he wasn’t about to take sides. In 2003, he defended the Dixie Chicks’ right to speak out against the impending invasion of Iraq while many others excoriated the group.
Merle Ronald Haggard was born on April 6, 1937, in Oildale, California, near Bakersfield. His parents had moved from Checotah, Oklahoma, a couple of years earlier, and he was reared in a converted boxcar. His brother and sister were much older, and he was hit hard, at age nine, by the death of their father, a carpenter for the Santa Fe Railroad.
His pain was deep, and his wild days roared to life. At 10 he hopped a freight train with a friend and wound up in Fresno. When his mother came to get him, she pointed out that he could have ridden free because the family had a railroad pass thanks to his father’s past employment. He later told reporters she didn’t understand his impulse at all. It was wanderlust, and it didn’t subside.
He was sent repeatedly to juvenile detention facilities for truancy, car theft and multiple escapes. At 16, he got a boost in confidence when Frizzell asked him to play a couple of songs for him, then put him on stage in front of a big crowd.
Haggard went on to record countless Frizzell songs and modelled his singing style after him.
But he was still wild. Married with two children, one night he and a friend planned to steal from a coffee shop and were waiting for the place to close. They got drunk, however, and burst in while the place was still open for business. He was sent to San Quentin, a serious place with an active death row on the premises. There, he was locked in solitary confinement for a week for brewing and selling beer.
After being paroled in 1960 from San Quentin, where he had joined the prison band, he worked odd jobs. He also started singing and playing in local honky-tonks for oil workers and Dust Bowl migrants as part of the Bakersfield sound, a breed of country more hard-edged than what was going on in Nashville.
In the mid-60s Haggard began recording, but his prolific writing came later. Two of his early hits, All My Friends are Gonna Be Strangers and I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, were written or co-written by Liz Anderson.
Haggard didn’t want to disclose his prison background, which he thought would hurt his career. It was Cash who urged his friend to reveal his past on-air in 1969, which actually boosted his profile. California governor Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1973 and invited him to play for him as president 10 years later. He also performed for Bill Clinton and received a Kennedy Centre Honors award in 2010 with Barack Obama presiding.
Though mainstream Nashville radio stopped playing him and he didn’t have any hits since the mid-80s, he toured and recorded constantly, his reputation growing to the point where he was the last survivor, along with Willie Nelson, to be compared with Hank Williams, Cash and George Jones.
When he wasn’t on the bus, he had a place on the Kern River near Bakersfield, but latterly he spent more time on his ranch near Lake Shasta in northern California.
He was married to his fifth wife, Theresa, for more than 22 years. In addition to four children from his first marriage, Haggard had a daughter, Jenessa and a son, Ben, who is now lead guitarist for the Strangers.
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