Appreciation: Merle Haggard left rich country legacy
In his 1968 song Mama Tried, Merle Haggard sang of turning 21 in prison. Haggard, who died Wednesday in California on his 79th birthday, had done just that, though not, as he sang in the song, “doing life without parole.”
Haggard’s youth of petty crime, financial insecurity and freight-car hopping eventually informed songs that spoke plainly but not predictably of social outcasts, blue-collar concerns and persistent restlessness.
Aside, perhaps, from Hank Williams, no other figure in country music affected the way songs would be written and how they would be sung as much as Haggard did. A 53-year recording career yielded 38 No. 1 country hits, a run exceeded only by Conway Twitty and George Strait.
Haggard was born in Oildale, Calif., in 1937, the son of a pair of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma. He spent his early years living in a house that his father, James Haggard, had fashioned from an abandoned refrigerated train car.
The elder Haggard died when Merle was 9, throwing his world into chaos. Two years later, he hopped his first railroad car, starting a series of encounters with police that culminated in a stretch of hard time.
Having botched a burglary — he and a friend tried to break into a restaurant while it was still open — Haggard spent two and a half years at San Quentin State Prison before being paroled in 1960, at 23. In 1972, then-California governor Ronald Reagan granted him a full pardon.
World reacts to Merle Haggard's death
Haggard had dabbled in music before prison. Inspired by a Johnny Cash concert at San Quentin, he pursued it in earnest upon his release, eventually landing a gig playing bass for California country star Wynn Stewart. Haggard signed to Tally Records in 1962. His Sing A Sad Song entered the charts the final week of 1963.
He moved to Capitol Records in 1965 and had his first chart-topper, The Fugitive, two years later. Rather than move to Nashville, as many country singers did, Haggard preferred to stay in California, often recording at Capitol’s Hollywood studios. The records he made with his band, The Strangers, sported lean, twangy arrangements that aligned him with the “Bakersfield sound” popularized by singers like Stewart and Buck Owens.
Haggard’s most famous hit, Okie From Muskogee, came in the fall of 1969. It spent four weeks atop the country chart; the following year, both Nashville’s Country Music Association and the Los Angeles-based Academy of Country Music picked it as the genre’s top single.
Okie touted traditional, patriotic values in his music. “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street,” Haggard sang on country radio stations as hundreds of thousands gathered for National Moratorium demonstrations against the Vietnam War, “but we like living right and being free.”
But Haggard’s own perspectives, even when it came to that song, rarely were so cut and dried. At times, he seemed to defend its conservative vantage point. Other times, he said he’d tried to put himself in the shoes of people like his father and imagine how they might have felt about the ’60s cultural climate.
Haggard’s politically oriented songs ran the gamut. If there was some question whether Haggard’s personal opinions matched those in Okie, no one could misunderstand his message for a certain type of protester in his next single: “When you’re runnin’ down our country, man, you’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”
Those songs — and Workin’ Man Blues, where he sang, “I ain’t never been on welfare, that’s one place I won’t be” — made him a favorite of Republicans, to the point that President Nixon invited Haggard and The Strangers to perform at the White House in 1973.
But Haggard answered to his own whims and beliefs, not those of any audience, and he felt no more comfortable in the Nixon camp than he did in Nashville. He sang about interracial romance (Irma Jackson) and illegal immigrants (The Immigrant) with the same kind of empathy he felt for inmates and ramblers.
Later, he criticized the media’s coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003’s That’s the News and the war itself in Rebuild America First. In 2007, he wrote a song supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.
Most country radio stations didn’t touch those songs. Of course, they hadn’t played many of Haggard’s new records since Reagan had left office.
Whether or not radio showed an interest in what he was doing, Haggard always kept his adventurous musical spirit. At the height of his career, he recorded tribute albums to his idols Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills, as well as a live album of Dixieland blues. Later, he signed with indie label Anti- and recorded an album honoring honky-tonk heroes Hank Williams, Hank Thompson and Lefty Frizzell. His last solo album, 2011’s Working in Tennessee — released three years after he lost half a lung to cancer — included a reworking of Workin' Man Blues recorded with his teenage son Ben and Willie Nelson.
Haggard used those reference points and others in his own work, creating music that invariably drew on the past, spoke to the present and influenced the future. He left an indelible mark on subsequent generations of singers, so his sound really has never left the airwaves.
It’s there, in the voices of Strait and Randy Travis, who claimed his influence, and in the songs of those who yearned for his gift of writing simply and with such emotional resonance. It’s in the music of Emmylou Harris, Alan Jackson and Dwight Yoakam, who recorded his songs.
Finally, it’s there in nearly a half-century’s worth of songs that span the range of the American experience. Songs about prisons and barrooms, of highways and trains, of loves lost and remembered, of life lived in the spotlight and looking in the mirror. Nobody approached those subjects quite like Haggard, but everyone could find a piece of themselves in his songs.
