OCTOBER, 2024
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—OCTOBER, 2024
PART 14:
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: October Music CALENDAR (next message)
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Part Fourteen:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-13:
"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 pronounce
d 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.
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.
With producer Jimmy Bowen at the helm, Haggard's sixth MCA album,
Back To The Barrooms,
constituted a radical departure from his classic country sound. "He was disappointed when he measured Bowen's work against the team that had brought him to fame," his biographer
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."
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. The best and most enduringly popular of them, "Big City", perfectly reflected the exhilaration he felt from regaining his personal and artistic freedom. "Big city, turn me loose and set me free," his protagonist demanded.
The song rocketed to Number 1 on the Billboard country chart. The
Big City
album, one of Haggard's very best, reached Number 3 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, and it also yielded several deservingly successful singles.
The inspiration for Haggard's next project had begun when he first heard the 1979 album
Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson.
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 Townes Van Zandt and recorded four years later by Emmylou Harris on her top-selling
Luxury Liner
album. "I loved Emmylou's version,” Nelson
recalls,
"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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"The album
Pancho and Lefty
was released by Epic on April 30, 1983 and jumped onto Billboard's album chart at No. 1, Merle's first appearance on the list since
It's All In The Movies
with the Strangers, on Capitol," Marc Eliot
relates.
The attention was well deserved. It was a masterful selection of old favorites and original songs with the two country legends trading lines and verses or harmonizing their voices with the companionable feel of a private, impromptu jam session. One of the most memorable of the originals was Haggard's "Reasons To Quit", perhaps the most poignant addict lament ever written. It amounts to a cost-benefit analysis of alcohol abuse with a sad but unsurprising conclusion. "The low is always lower than the high," Willie admits, but "the reasons to quit don't outnumber all the reasons why."
"In 1985 Merle recorded his fortieth album, for release the following year," his biographer
relates.
"Kern River
included the title song about a man's girlfriend who drowns in the Kern River."
Eliot correctly characterizes it as a grim song—so grim, in fact, that it almost didn't get recorded. "Columbia Records executive Rick Blackburn, the Nashville-based head of Epic at the time, hated the song," he
explains.
After telling Haggard so on several occasions, Haggard confronted him head-on at a meeting in Nashville. "That's about the fifth time you've told me that," he raged. "Well, I'm about five times short of telling you to go to hell. You're the son-of-a-bitch that sat over there at that desk and fired Johnny Cash. Let it go down in history that you're the dumbest son-of-a-bitch I've ever met!" The song got recorded and made it to Number 10 on the Billboard country singles chart, but predictably, it marked the beginning of the end for Merle Haggard's relationship with Epic.
Haggard stayed long enough to record two more albums. The first was another duet project with Willie Nelson,
The Seashores of Old Mexico:
a good record though not as memorable as
Pancho and Lefty.
It yielded one country hit, "If I could Only Fly", which would become a still bigger Haggard hit when he revisited it nearly twenty years later. The album wasn't released until 1987, and despite the company's promotional neglect, it rose to Number 11 on Billboard's country chart.
Its most unusual feature was the inclusion of Paul McCartney's "Yesterday". "It was one of the few non-country songs that appealed to Merle," Marc Eliot
elaborates.
"He liked the simple beauty of its rich, melancholic lyrics and the singer's longing to return to the past, themes that resonated with him."
In 1986 Haggard recorded
A Friend In California,
with several songs, including the title number, written or co-written by one of his favorite collaborators, Freddy Powers. Highlights included "Texas" and "The Okie From Muskogee's Comin Home". The album's most autobiographical opus, "Mama's Prayer", chronicled Haggard's narrowest life-saving escapes. "From the death house in San Quentin I walked away a better man," he concludes. "Somehow my mama's prayers had worked again."
"Merle didn't kid himself," Eliot
remarks.
"He knew his albums sounded increasingly tired and repetitious. Staring down the half-century mark, his live shows had begun to lack the youthful enthusiasm of his earlier performances, and they continued to decrease in length. He blamed his situation partly on Epic: after they'd let Johnny Cash go, Merle didn't want to give them any new music. Yet again, he held back his best new songs for his next label, whatever it might be."
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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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Learn Irish Tune Session Basics 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 presenting award-winning musician John Whelan in a workshop that will prepare you to participate with confidence in Irish fiddle tune sessions like the ones that take place on Wednesdays and Thursdays at Shawn O'Donnell's in Fremont (see music calendar in this issue). The workshop takes place on Saturday, October 19th at 2 PM.
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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Vintage Gibson Mandolin 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 1915-17 Gibson A-style mandolin. "This mandolin sounds great, producing a lovely, woody sound with a well-aged resonance that can only come from an instrument of this vintage," the website proclaims.
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:
Bulldog News: 4208 University Way Northeast
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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