HAGGARD

Aside from being one of country music’s finest singers, Merle Haggard has also been one of America’s most prolific songwriters. His best songs were powerful vignettes portraying damaged souls who manage to summon the inner strength to resist life’s worst onslaughts. That Haggard himself lived through many of the traumas he sang about is evident from his music, giving it a rare emotional quality.

RAISED IN A BOXCAR

Merle Haggard was born in April 1937 near Bakersfield, California, to a family of Oklahomans who had just made the westward trek. Haggard’s early childhood home was a converted boxcar. When Merle was 9, his father died of a stroke. Many of Haggard’s songs recall the troubles of those early years, including “Mamma’s Hungry Eyes,” “California Cottonfields,” and “The Way It Was in ′51.” Haggard quit school in the eighth grade and hopped on a freight train when he was 14, roaming the Southwest for several years and filling the void left by his father’s death with a life of petty crime and time in reform schools. This was also when he began dabbling in music. At 20, Haggard, now an alcoholic, married and a father, attempted to break into a restaurant that was still open for business. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in San Quentin.

Paroled in 1960, Haggard returned to Bakersfield and, while digging ditches for his brother, began performing country music. He scored a regional hit with “Sing a Sad Song” in 1963, which landed him a contract with Capitol Records.

After the minor hits (“Swingin’ Doors” and “All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers”) Haggard’s career took off in earnest in 1966 with “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.” The tune featured a subdued, acoustic-based arrangement, with Haggard’s masterful voice singing the quietly desperate words of a man on the run. “Fugitive” became a No. 1 country hit, and Haggard was voted the Academy of Country Music’s Top Male Vocalist of the Year. The record’s success initiated the most productive period of Haggard’s career, with songs such as “Sing Me Back Home,” “Branded Man,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” “Mama Tried,” “Pride in What I Am,” and “White Line Fever” among the sublime country treasures Haggard recorded between 1966 and 1969. Not only did this material appeal to country fans, but his common-man perspective and Okie heritage also brought praise from the folk-music crowd, who hailed Haggard as a modern-day Woody GUTHRIE.

Unfortunately, those same folkies cringed when they heard Haggard’s 1969 single, “Okie From Muskogee.” Although Haggard subsequently claimed that this hokey paean to conservatism was nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek joke, he found himself thrust unwittingly into the middle of America’s political struggle between left and right. When Capitol killed Haggard’s intended next single—the interracial love saga “Irma Jackson” —in favour of the unrepentant “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” he became, as one writer put it, “sort of the Spiro Agnew of music.”

Despite being President Nixon’s favourite country singer and an object of hate to many people, Haggard was firmly established as one of country’s biggest stars, as well as a veritable national icon.

Haggard remained popular throughout the 1970s, but his record sales dropped off in the 1980s as the country music industry became less enthusiastic about supporting its veteran acts. Haggard also faced several emotional crises, enduring a divorce (his third), near bankruptcy, and the deaths of both his mother and his close friend Lewis Talley.

Haggard persevered. In 1994, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and his music was celebrated on two tribute albums by contemporary performers, Mamma’s Hungry Eyes and Tulare Dust. His album 1996 was one of his finest in many years.

Greg Bower

MERLE

HAGGARD

RAISED IN A BOXCAR