July, 2024
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—JULY, 2024
PART THIRTEEN: MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN, OUT THE SOUNDS: July MUSIC CALENDAR (next message)
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Part Thirteen:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-12:
"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 Hag:
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
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.
More top-selling albums followed which included his most enduringly popular hits, but in 1976 his long and fruitful relationship with Capitol 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.
Haggard's first MCA album,
Ramblin' Fever,
emerged in 1977 and reached Number 5 on the Billboard survey. His next one was motivated by the untimely death of Elvis Presley on August 16th, 1977.
My Farewell To Elvis
was a heartfelt tribute that went to Number 6 on the Billboard country survey and Number 133 in pop.
Haggard's next MCA album,
I'm Always On A Mountain When I Fall,
came out in 1978. Its title song was one of three tracks that made the country Top Ten, but the album itself was his first to fall short of that distinction in its corresponding category. During that same year, Haggard got a surprise offer from record producer Snuff Garrett, who offered him a duet role for a song to be included in a Clint Eastwood film called
Bronco Billy.
The movie, released in June 1980, did very well at the box office, and so did the accompanying soundtrack album, driven by the song, "Barroom Buddies", co-written and produced by Garrett. When the song was released as a single, it zoomed to Number 1 on the Billboard country survey and stayed near the top for thirteen weeks. Its success prompted the release of another soundtrack number from Haggard, "Misery and Gin", on a single which went to Number 3.
"Merle liked "Misery" so much he included it on
Back To The Barrooms,
his thirty-first studio album—his sixth (and penultimate) one for MCA," Marc Eliot
recounts.
Although Eliot considers it one of Haggard's best albums, I, hardcore traditionalist that I am, respectfully disagree. With producer Jimmy Bowen at the helm, it constituted a radical departure from the classic Haggard sound.
Apparently, as Eliot tells it, Haggard shared my opinion. "He was disappointed when he measured Bowen's work against the team that had brought him to fame," the author
relates.
"The more he thought about his Capitol years, the more he doubted the wisdom of his move to Nashville, where he felt like a stranger in a strange land. He longed for the peace, quiet, privacy, and expanse of the West Coast."
Haggard's final MCA album was released in 1981: a gospel album called
Songs For The Mama That Tried,
dedicated to his 79-year-old mother. "The entire album was beautiful work by any measure," Marc Eliot
comments,
"but it produced no singles and reached only No. 46 on Billboard's country album chart. With his pretty-boy face starting to crease and wrinkle, his hairline receding, his career in commercial decline, and his third marriage on the rocks, Merle decided he'd had enough. He walked off his steady job and announced that he was retiring."
"Only he didn't retire," Eliot
continues.
"While the new boys and girls on the block were dominating the charts, an appreciation of the more classic styles of country music began to take hold in the big cities above the Mason-Dixon Line."
One of the most prestigious of them was New York's Lone Star Café, where Haggard appeared on June 4th, 1980, drawing an overflow crowd and garnering a rave review in The New York Times. The club brought him back the following May, and the year after that, he played Carnegie Hall. With the weight of such evidence as this on his side, Merle Haggard could now say with the unsinkable Molly Brown, "I ain't down yet!"
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Once again out of wedlock, out of Nashville, and back home in California, Merle Haggard set to work with enthusiasm on material for his new Epic label. "Epic was the funkier little brother to Columbia Records," Eliot
explains.
The move, he elaborates, felt to Haggard "like a breath of fresh country air after being confined to what he considered MCA's limiting creative atmosphere."
"As he had done when he knew he wasn't going to re-sign with Capitol," Eliot
continues, "Merle held back a stockpile of eight new and original songs from MCA and used them instead on his first album at his new label." The best and most enduringly popular of them perfectly reflected the exhilaration he felt from regaining his personal and artistic freedom.
The inspiration came from a conversation with his lifelong friend and band bus driver, Dean Roe. Roe had driven him and the Strangers from his home in Palo Cedro to the Hollywood studio where they were working on tracks for the new album. "Roe waited outside to do some maintenance on the bus," Eliot
elaborates.
"After the session ended and Merle came back to the bus, he noticed how smudged and oily Dean's hands were and that his face was dirty and covered with sweat. When Merle asked how he was doing, Dean grunted and said, "I'm tired of this dirty old city. If it were up to me, I'd be somewhere in the middle of damn Montana."
"Merle jumped on the bus, reached for a pad and pencil, and wrote down what Dean had just said," Eliot
concludes.
The song, "Big City", was finished in twenty minutes and recorded the same day in a single take with no rehearsal.
"Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana," his protagonist demanded. "Gimme all I got comin' to me. Keep your retirement and your so-called Social Security. Big city, turn me loose and set me free!" The song rocketed to Number 1 on the Billboard country chart, and since Dean Roe was the source of its inspiration, Haggard thanked him with half his share of its copyright royalties, which eventually amounted to half a million dollars.
The BIG CITY
album,
one of Haggard's very best, reached Number 3 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. It also yielded several deservingly successful singles. "My Favorite Memory", a regretful love song to Haggard's second and most compatible wife, Bonnie Owens, also reached Number 1. His delivery was achingly plaintive, and the sensitive string orchestration added the perfect dramatic touch.
His best patriotic song yet, "Are The Good Times Really Over", went to Number 2 and became one of his most definitive compositions. "Wish Coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be," he lamented, but he ended on a note of hopeful challenge: "Let's make a Ford and a Chevy that'll still last ten years like they should cause the best of the free life is still yet to come, and the good times ain't over for good."
The inspiration for Haggard's next project had begun when he first heard the 1979 album
Willie Nelson Sings Kristoferson.
"I wound up with that tape on my houseboat and before I'd go out on tour, I'd put it on for about three days and play guitar with it," he said later. He'd been wanting to record with the newly famous musical Outlaw ever since then, so while on tour to promote the BIG CITY album three years later, he paid Nelson a visit in Texas.
They had talked about making a duet album for some time, but it took another year before their touring schedules allowed them the free time to work on it. They spent five days at Nelson's home studio just west of Austin. "Before we knew it," Nelson recalls in Marc Eliot's
book,
"we'd sung something like twenty songs. At some point in this process my daughter Lana called me up late at night to say she'd found a song she thought I might like. One listen told me that she was right."
The song was "Pancho and Lefty", a western outlaw ballad of friendship and betrayal that had been written in 1972 by Austin folk singer/songwriter
and recorded four years later by Emmylou Harris on her top-selling
Luxury Liner
album. "I loved Emmylou's version," Nelson recalled, "but I could see how the song lent itself to a duet sung by two men. I couldn't wait for Merle to hear it."
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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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WHAT'S IN STORE: NEWS FROM THE MUSICAL Marketplace
Find The Merle Haggard Story At Phinney Books
"There's the guy I'd love to be and the guy I am," country music legend Merle Haggard once confided to biographer Marc Eliot. "I'm somewhere in between, in deep water, swimming to the other shore." All the complexity of the circumstances and choices that shaped him are revealed with unflinching honesty in Eliot's recent book THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard. Your copy is waiting for you at Phinney Books in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Avenue North
Web: www.phinneybooks.com
Phone: 206/297-2665
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Find Pisgah's Roscoe Clawhammer Banjo At Dusty Strings
Dusty Strings Music Store and School in Seattle's Fremont district, long known for its array of fine stringed instruments, instructional workshops, and folk concerts, is now featuring Pisgah Banjo Company's Roscoe model. Named for legendary Appalachian balladeer and clawhammer-style banjoist Roscoe Holcomb, this open-back instrument is, according to the Dusty Strings website, "Pisgah's most affordable offering." It "provides a plunky, dark, and mellow tonality that stands above anything else in this price category."
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
―――――――――――――――――—- Two Vintage Martins At Emerald City Guitars
Emerald City Guitars in Seattle's Pioneer Square, well known for its fascinating selection of new and vintage acoustic and electric guitars, amps, and accessories, has recently acquired a well-preserved 1935 Martin 0-18 with hard-shell case and a 1944 Martin 0-18 in "mostly original condition,", according to the Emerald City website.
Emerald City Guitars
83 South Washington Street
Phone: 206/382-0231
Web: www.emeraldcityguitars.com
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On The Newsstand: Heritage Music Review
The print edition of Heritage Music Review is available by subscription for $15 per year and on sale at the following Seattle newsstands and music venues:
FREMONT:
American Music: 4450 Fremont Avenue North
Dusty Strings Acoustic Music Shop: 3406 Fremont Avenue North
UNIVERSITY DISTRICT:
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GREENWOOD:
Phinney Books: 7405 Greenwood Avenue North
CAPITOL HILL:
Elliott Bay Book Company: 1521 10th Avenue
PIONEER SQUARE:
Emerald City Guitars: 83 South Washington Street
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