May, 2024
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—MAY, 2024
PART ELEVEN: MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
CHECKIN, OUT THE SOUNDS: MAY MUSIC CALENDAR (next message)
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Part Eleven:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-10:
"Merle Haggard has always been as deep as it gets," Bob Dylan once said. "He's probably one of our greatest living songwriters." He died on his 79th birthday—April 6, 2016—at his ranch in Shasta County, California, but his legend lives on, and it's the subject of a new biography by Marc Eliot. It's entitled
The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard.
Merle Ronald Haggard was born on the morning of April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield, California and raised in the working-class suburb of Oildale. His father had been a popular fiddler during his youth in Oklahoma at local dances and weddings, and it soon became obvious that his penchant for music had been passed on to his infant son. Lying in his bassinet, Merle would keep time with his feet whenever country music played on the radio.
Of all the artists he heard in early childhood, his two favorites were "Mississippi Blue Yodeler"
Jimmie Rodgers
and
Bob Wills,
who popularized western swing with his Texas Playboys. In 1951, at age 14, Haggard discovered another country artist who made a deep impression: up-and-coming singer/songwriter
Lefty Frizzell,
whom he saw for the first time at Bakersfield's Rainbow Gardens.
A pivotal point in young Merle's life had come years earlier when his older brother Lowell, who had moved out on his own and taken a job at a filling station, brought him a cheap Sears Roebuck guitar that a customer had given him in exchange for two dollars' worth of gas. After his father taught him a few chords, Haggard took the proverbial football and ran with it, figuring out more chords by playing along with the records in the family collection. Eventually, he was writing his own songs.
On June 19th, 1946, Jim Haggard died from a stroke that may have been brought on by a head injury from a car accident a month earlier, and the loss had a devastating effect on his young son. "He thought there must have been some connection between his own recent illness and his father's stroke," Eliot
explains.
"He soon transformed that guilt into a thirst for adventure."
The adventures began when, at age eleven, he hopped a freight train with another boy despite the fact that as the son of a Southern Pacific employee, he was entitled to ride as a passenger whenever he wanted. Three years later, Haggard was still cutting classes most of the time and hopping freights whenever he could.
When 14-year-old Merle Haggard returned to school in September 1951, Eliot
recounts,
"it took only nine days before he decided he'd had enough, even if the truant officers, all of whom knew his name, came looking for him." A family court judge sent him to the Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility for Boys, where he endured a year of very harsh treatment. After another long truancy, the same judge pronounced him incorrigible and sent him to a much stricter facility.
"He was sixteen by the time he was released, tougher than ever and hardly reformed," Eliot
writes.
Nevertheless, Merle Haggard was soon to get the first big break of his teenage life the following January when
Lefty Frizzell
returned to the Rainbow Gardens. It was then that he met his idol through singer/steel guitarist Billy Mize, a well-known figure in local country-music circles whose band was opening for Frizzell. "I got to use his guitar and have his band play behind me," Haggard later said. "It was quite a thrill."
When Mize invited him to appear on his new local TV show, it appeared to young Merle Haggard that nothing could stop him from realizing his dream of a career in country music. "He was wrong," Marc Eliot writes. "He hadn't counted on the brick wall of self-destruction that stood in his way."
Haggard took menial jobs by day but spent his evenings sitting in with local country bands, and in two years he had built a reputation as a solid rhythm guitarist and was picking up regular work. Nevertheless, one evening over a beer with a co-worker, the conversation turned to stealing cars, and at his suggestion, they searched for an unlocked vehicle, intending to cross the Nevada line, avail themselves of the state's legalized prostitution, and get home for the next morning's shift.
They were caught with an almost-new '56 Oldsmobile 88, and Haggard was carried off to the local jail. More bad decisions followed, including a robbery, an attempted robbery, and a short-lived escape from the Bakersfield jail on Christmas Day 1957. Consequently, he found himself in the notorious San Quentin prison by the end of February 1958 with a sentence of six months to fifteen years and all privileges revoked, including access to the Martin guitar his mother had bought him when he was 14.
Merle Haggard was finally released on November 3rd, 1960. Back home, he started showing up at local nightspots again and landed steady gigs that enabled him to work six nights a week. At a temporary engagement in the fall of 1962, he was rediscovered by steel guitarist Fuzzy Owen, to whom he had submitted a demo tape years earlier for Owen's local Tally label. The two sides he recorded,
released
in early 1963, caught the ear of Ken Nelson, whose country music division had launched
Buck Owens
at Capitol Records.
After a hit with Wynn Stewart's "Sing A Sad Song" and a less successful follow-up, Haggard signed with Capitol in February 1964. His first Capitol single, songwriter Liz Anderson's "(my friends are gonna be)
Strangers",
reached Number 10 on the Billboard country chart, and his first album,
Strangers,
emerged in September 1965, earning him a citation from the newly formed Academy of Country Music as Best New Male Vocalist of 1965.
By this time, Haggard had married Buck Owens' first wife, Bonnie Owens, whose debut Capitol album garnered her an award for Top Female Vocalist of 1965. "Ken Nelson knew a good thing when he saw it," Eliot
reports,
"and brought Merle and Bonnie back into Capitol Studios to record an album called
which did even better than the one Haggard had just released, vaulting all the way to Number 4 on the Billboard chart.
More top-selling albums followed which included the unforgettable hits
"Swinging Doors",
"The Bottle Let Me Down",
"I'm A Lonesome Fugitive",
"Branded Man",
"Sing Me Back Home",
"Mama Tried",
"Hungry Eyes",
"Workin' Man Blues",
"Silver Wings",
"Okie From Muskogee",
and
There were also tribute albums to his first two childhood heroes,
Jimmie Rodgers
and
Bob Wills,
as well as a memorable 1973 concert album with a three-piece Dixieland horn section entitled
I Love Dixie Blues
(So I Recorded Live In New Orleans).
By the fall of 1973, Merle Haggard's marriage had deteriorated to the point that Bonnie requested a formal separation. By the end of 1974, with Bonnie out of his life for all practical purposes, Haggard resigned himself to searching for her replacement, musically and otherwise. He finally set his hopes on Dolly Parton.
"Parton officially began touring with Merle in the summer of 1974," Eliot
elaborates,
"and they were an instant hit onstage. The tour made a lot of money and sold truckloads of albums for both, but it didn't last. She was tired of Merle chasing her around the bus, and her solo career was taking off. She decided to leave the tour."
In 1976 Merle Haggard's long and fruitful relationship with Capitol Records came to an end. MCA Records' country music division, based in Nashville, had offered him a much more lucrative contract that would give him ownership of all the master recordings he generated there, and when Ken Nelson at Capitol refused to match those terms, he signed with MCA.
However, he still owed Capitol three more albums, all to be completed that year. The stylistically varied
It's All In The Movies,
with a pop-flavored title song co-written with his daughter Kelli, was his final chart-topping album. His follow-up release,
My Love Affair With Trains,
proved to be the last of his heartfelt concept albums for Capitol.
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Haggard's final Capitol album,
The Roots of My Raising,
reached Number 8 on Billboard's country chart, and its title track gave him his 23rd Number 1 country hit. Written by Bakersfield honky-tonk pioneer Tommy Collins, it painted one of the happiest "family values" portraits in all of country music. "The roots of my raisin' run deep," Haggard sang. "I've come back for the strength that I need." Revisiting this song now that I'm more familiar with his story, I can't help wondering if he might have been spared the years wasted on crime and punishment if his father had lived to guide him into adulthood and make the song's homecoming scenario possible.
Nevertheless, his father's musical influence is wonderfully evident on this album, making its title especially meaningful. The Bob Wills sound is obvious in "The Waltz You saved For Me" and "Cherokee Maiden". Lefty Frizzell is represented by one of his most poignant laments of all time, "I Never Go Around Mirrors ]cause I can't stand to see me without you by my side)." As one listens to him yodeling his way through the Jimmie Rodgers classics "Gambling Polka Dot Blues" and "Mississippi Delta Blues", graced by an exuberant Dixieland horn section, it's obvious that Hag is having the time of his life.
It was guitarist Ronnie Reno, a former member of the Strangers line-up, who introduced Haggard to country singer Leona Williams, who had been in the business fifteen years but hadn't yet caught her big break. "I got Leona the job with Merle when he was still looking for a permanent female singer to do the harmonies," Reno recalls in Marc Eliot's
book.
"I had known Leona for a while, as we both were from Nashville, and she had a reputation as a great harmony singer."
"Merle gave her the harmony slot on his tour," Eliot
continues.
"Energized by his attraction to her, he wrote a lot of new music. Eventually, after he and Bonnie finalized a divorce, Haggard reluctantly pulled up his California roots, moved to the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville at Leona's insistence, and married her in 1978. "She wanted to be a star," Haggard's longtime friend Frank Mull confides in Eliot's
book.
"She was a good singer, people loved her voice and how she put over her songs, but she thought being with Merle would help her get to where she hadn't yet arrived."
Meanwhile, Haggard's first MCA album,
Ramblin' Fever,
had emerged in 1977 and reached Number 5 on the Billboard survey. Its title track, released ahead of the album, zoomed to Number 2 on the singles chart. It was one of only two originals on the album, and its sentiment was pure Haggard. "I caught this ramblin' fever long ago," he sang autobiographically, "when I first heard a lonesome whistle blow."
His next album, which emerged in September, came, not from MCA, but from his former record company, Capitol. "Labels often clean out the closets when a big name leaves," Eliot
explains.
A Working Man Can't Get Nowhere
was a combination of old tracks Merle had recorded and not released, and a few covers, none of which he owned the masters to." It went no further than Number 28 on the Billboard chart.
Haggard's next MCA release was motivated by the untimely death of Elvis Presley on August 16th, 1977.
My Farewell To Elvis
began with a compelling Haggard original called "From Graceland To The Promised Land". Alluding to Presley's lifelong love of gospel music, he sang, "It's a long way from Graceland across Jordan to the Promised Land, but Jesus finally came to lead him home." Released as a single, it reached Number 4 on Billboard's country chart.
The album was a heartfelt tribute with a selection of material that took Haggard into unexpected stylistic territory, with mixed results. One of his most effective attempts at rockabilly was "That's All Right Mama", which reached the upper end of his vocal range, possibly reflecting Marty Robbins' early approach to rockabilly. For "Heartbreak Hotel", Haggard added an overdubbed unison track to his more normally pitched vocal delivery, and it worked surprisingly well. "Love Me Tender", much better suited to his voice and style than the rockabilly tracks, was sensitively orchestrated and sung with conviction.
With its Jordanaires-style choral backing and obvious reverence for Presley's classic records, the album was a fitting tribute. "It was produced by Fuzzy Owen, who, at this point, Merle trusted more than any producer in Nashville," Marc Eliot
points out.
It went to Number 6 on the Billboard country survey and Number 133 in pop.
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(This article will continue in the next issue of Heritage Music Review. Your copy of Marc Eliot's book, THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard, is waiting for you at Phinney Books, 7405 Greenwood Avenue North in Seattle.
Phone: 206/297-2665
Web: www.phinneybooks.com).
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