Merle Haggard, country music legend, dies at 79
Singer, songwriter left behind a rich 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 freightcar 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, 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. He spent 21⁄ years
2 at San Quentin State Prison after a botched burglary before being paroled in 1960, at age 23.
He 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 charttopper, The Fugitive, two years later. Rather than move to Nashville, Haggard preferred to stay in California, often recording at Capitol’s Hollywood studios. Haggard’s most famous hit,
Okie From Muskogee, came in fall 1969 and touted traditional, patriotic values. “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. 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, Workin’ Man
Blues: “When you’re runnin’ down our country, man, you’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”
Haggard created 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 more than 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.