NOVEMBER, 2024
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—NOVEMBER, 2024
PART 15:
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: November Music CALENDAR (next message)
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Part Fifteen:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-14:
"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
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. After five more albums, Haggard left MCA and joined Columbia's Epic subsidiary in 1982.
His first Epic album was
Big City,
with a title song that rocketed to Number 1 on the Billboard country chart. The 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.
Its follow-up,
Pancho and Lefty,
was a duet with Willie Nelson that constituted another hit-making milestone in his career. Not long after the 1987 release of another Nelson duet album,
The Seashores of Old Mexico,
Haggard parted company with Epic as the result of a bitter disagreement with Columbia executive Rick Blackburn. "Yet again," his biography
points out,
"he held back his best new songs for his next label, whatever it might be."
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Merle Haggard's final album for Epic,
Chill Factor,
emerged in late 1987. It turned out to be one of his very best, communicating his loneliness with eloquent compositions sung with the kind of plaintive delivery that bore the unmistakable stamp of his hero
Lefty Frizzell.
It yielded his final Number 1 hit, "Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star".
Though Marc Eliot dismisses it as "a bit of fluff," this song, written with collaborator Freddy Powers, is a country classic in both the qualitative and historical senses of the word. Its 6/8 time signature and Fifties ballad accompaniment, complete with Jordanaires-style vocal backing, made it sound like it could just as easily have been recorded by
Ferlin Husky
in 1957. As for the album, it garnered a well-deserved Number 8 spot on the Billboard country chart.
In 1990 Haggard signed up with industry veteran Mike Curb's Nashville-based Curb label. "There was a lot Merle initially liked about Curb," Marc Eliot
explains,
"especially how he didn't have to answer to the bottom-dollar corporate execs in Los Angeles, Nashville, or New York City, and the willingness to sign a lot of talent the majors were no longer or ever interested in."
"Curb had sold the label's distribution rights to Warner Bros. but kept close control of his artists, many of whom then had their biggest hits under his guidance," Eliot
continues.
"To sign with the label, and desperate for cash to avoid bankruptcy, Merle asked Curb for a hefty amount of advance money." An agreement was reached, and the deal was struck.
Haggard's first Curb release, BLUE JUNGLE, included a song he had recently written protesting the Supreme Court's decision that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. He had intended "Me and Crippled Soldiers Give A Damn" to be his next single, but Mike Curb rejected the idea. "That set off the first of a series of battles with Curb, who insisted the relatively benign "When It Rains It Pours" had a better chance of becoming a hit," Marc Eliot
elaborates,
"and made what he thought was a compromise by putting "Crippled Soldiers" on the B side."
Two more topical songs on the album addressed the issue of homelessness. In "Under The Bridge", Haggard's protagonist has just lost a twenty-year position as a railroad employee. "Under the bridge, I can make believe I'm livin' in a castle," he muses. "Under the bridge, my baby and me." On "My Home Is In The Street", the young daughter of a close-knit but unhoused family declares to an inquirer, "No sir, I'm not homeless, we just need a house to put it in."
Artistically, the album was a good one, but it reached no higher than Number 47 on the Billboard country survey. "Curb put the blame for the album's relative failure squarely on "Crippled Soldiers," while Merle insisted Blue Jungle didn't do better because Curb had done nothing to promote the album," Marc Eliot
explains.
"Curb then refused to release a second Merle Haggard album, he said, until the first had recouped all its production expenses. Merle was furious."
"The impasse between Curb and Merle lasted four years, during which time Curb released no new Haggard music," Eliot
continues.
"With his signing money having run out, with his career in decline, his music out of fashion, owing money to everybody—ex-wives, the government, the banks, and whoever else was in line, Merle was desperate for cash. On December 14th, 1992, he filed for Chapter 11. The bankruptcy left him feeling the lowest he'd been since San Quentin."
Finally, by the end of the following year, Merle Haggard had another Curb album in the works. "He wanted to call it, appropriately and mockingly, 1994, to commemorate when it was made and to underscore how long it had been since the label released his 1990 debut album," Marc Eliot
elaborates.
"The truth was that Mike Curb had long ago lost any interest in Merle."
Nevertheless, the album was released the following March. Dan Cooper at All Music, now AllMusic.com, hailed it as Haggard's strongest effort since
Big City,
and although I wouldn't go quite that far, the album contained some truly memorable moments.
In "Way Back In The Mountains", co-written with well-respected country composer Max D. Barnes, Haggard's protagonist echoes the "Big City" sentiment with the frustrated assessment, "If all I can make is a living, I should have moved back a long time ago." In "What's New In New York City", a man who has opted for the simplicity of country life asks the woman who has just left him, "What's new in New York City? Do you miss my love at all?" Given the ironic tone in which he says, "I know you do," the answer appears painfully obvious. It's another Haggard masterpiece with a 1920's
Jimmie Rodgers
feel and great Dixieland trumpet work from Don Markham.
In "Troubadour", Haggard hits close to home with a nod to the average working country singer who's out on the road "doin' every song ol' Hag can write." "I'll always be a minor-leaguer, prob'ly never get no bigger," he admits. "I just love to play my old guitar."
In the achingly sad Max Barnes composition "In My Next Life", a hard-working farmer says to his wife as a crop failure finally costs them their home, "In my next life I want to be your hero, Something better than I turned out to be." It was arguably one of the greatest numbers in Merle Haggard's catalogue and the only one on the album that was released as a single, but it failed to chart, and the album itself rose no higher than Number 60.
"Merle was livid when the album bombed," his biographer
relates,
"and once again placed the blame squarely on Mike Curb."
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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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"Super Secret Holiday Sale" 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 holding a Super secret holiday sale" beginning November 29th. "You'll have to visit us in person to see the special deals we've wrapped up for you," the website advises, so don't miss out!
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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Vintage Fender Amp 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 1965 Fender Vibrolux amp in very good condition. "This combo has the perfect balance of size and power with 35 watts of rich tube tone," 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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