FEBRUARY, 2025
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—February, 2025
PART 18:
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: February Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART EIGHTEEN:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-17:
"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 ⠠, 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,
⠗⠑⠇⠂⠎⠫
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. He cut seven albums there before joining Columbia Records' 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,
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.
In 1990 Haggard signed up with industry veteran Mike Curb's Nashville-based Curb label, but the relationship proved to be a stormy one. After six years and three good but lazily promoted albums, Haggard was on his own again.
In 1999 Merle Haggard was discovered by Andy Kaulkin, who had just scored a Grammy award with the newly-signed Tom Waits on his Anti- label.
"If I Could Only Fly,
sixty-three—year-old Merle Haggard's fiftieth studio album and his first on Anti-, was released October 10, 2000, and proved an immediate hit," Eliot
relates.
It stayed on Billboard's country chart for nearly four months and peaked at Number 23, doing better than a Haggard album had done since 1987's
Chill Factor.
"While it yielded no singles," Marc Eliot
points out,
"it proved that this time Merle was on the comeback trail for real."
Haggard's 2001 follow-up album,
Roots, Vol. 1,
paid tribute to his idol
Lefty Frizzell
as well as Frizzell's contemporaries
Hank Williams
and
Hank Thompson.
If "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," Haggard's honky-tonk heroes were spectacularly well flattered both vocally and instrumentally. All that remains to be said about this Merle Haggard masterpiece is to quote a line from one of his greatest songs: "That's
The Way It Was In '51.”
The album constituted one of the finest moments of Haggard's recording career, but it didn't get anywhere near the commercial success it deserved, rising no higher than Number 47 on Billboard's country album chart. "Merle insisted on renegotiating his deal with Anti- for his next album, which he wanted to call Roots Vol. 2, most of which he had recorded during the same sessions as volume 1," his biographer
writes.
Unfortunately for Haggard and his tradition-oriented fans, Kaulkin wasn't interested in his album project or the new contract terms he proposed, so once again, Haggard decided to go out on his own.
"After leaving Anti," Marc Eliot
writes,
"Merle cut four very good albums, none of which sold very well." By the end of 2004, he decided he was ready to return to Capitol. When asked why, he
explained,
"We have kids that are running Capitol Records that are anxious to work with me and all that old body of work."
"He was eager to get an album out for his new label," Eliot
declares.
"His fifty-sixth was released a week and a half before Christmas 2004,
Unforgettable.
It was a collection of American Songbook standards similar in concept to Willie Nelson's 1978 No. 1 album
Stardust.”
It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was a valiant effort. When the songs were pitched low enough to accommodate Haggard's aging voice, they worked well, enabling him to reflect the western swing influence of his lifelong hero
Bob Wills,
but when they were pitched too high, his voice just sounded strained and tired. Still, the album sold better than a Haggard release had done in years, reaching Number 39 on the Billboard country chart.
"Capitol was satisfied," his biographer
points out,
but "Merle wasn't. Hovering just under the Top 40, it proved that Merle's audience was aging with him, and were loyal, forgiving, perhaps insatiable, but just not that willing or able to spend as much disposable income on music. The other grim reality that Merle understood was that plastic sales were increasingly difficult to compete with streaming. A few of the biggest names still sold well, but for younger audiences, buying music meant downloading it on your phone."
Yet despite the changing times, Merle Haggard was by no means a forgotten man. In 2006 he won a Grammy in the Lifetime Achievement category.
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"Merle had begun to feel himself winding down after a quick series of concerts to promote
Unforgettable,”
his biographer
relates,
"when a phone call to the ranch changed everything. The person on the other end was his new booking agent, Lance Roberts, who told him that Bob Dylan wanted him to be his opening act on the next leg of his "Never Ending Tour."
"He had gone through a lot of agents and agencies and hadn't found the right fit," Roberts recalls in Marc Eliot's
book.
"Merle gave me a shot and the result changed both our lives. For a while, he played a series of smaller venues, until I got the call from Dylan's people and everything changed. It was, without any doubt, opening for Bob Dylan that exposed Merle to a whole new audience, and made him a superstar all over again."
"Those who'd come to see only Dylan wound up loving Merle," Marc Eliot
reports.
"Whether they were aware of who he was or were familiar with his music, they found his stage presentation and manner so appealing, there was a distinct feeling by many at those shows they were getting two legends for the price of one. It was no accident. Merle made it a point to charm Dylan's audiences."
"Merle made more money from this tour than he had in years," his biographer
sumarizes,
"but it wasn't the cash that made it special. It put him back on top of country music, and this time he was determined to stay there."
"In March 2007," Marc Eliot
writes,
"Merle began a series of shows and recordings that constituted one of the most active periods of his life." It started with a fifteen-date tour with fellow country music legends
Ray Price
and Willie Nelson that resulted in a 22-track live album on Lost Highway Records, a Nashville-based subsidiary of Universal Music Group. It was momentously entitled
Last of The Breed.
The album was an unintended but worthy folow-up to Haggard's
Roots, Vol. 1,
taking the three honky-tonk masters through a lifetime of songs written or recorded by a Who's Who of greats including
bob Wills,
Hank Williams,
Lefty Frizzell,
Harlan Howard, Cindy Walker, and one of this critic's all-time favorites,
Floyd Tillman.
Though all three voices, especially that of 81-year-old Ray Price, definitely showed their age, they were gloriously in their element, backed by such notable instrumentalists as steel guitarist Buddy Emmons, fiddler Johnny Gimble, and tenor saxophonist Boots Randolph. To top it all off, the Jordanaires, who had backed
Elvis Presley
in the Fifties and early Sixties, contributed rich background harmony when needed. It rose to a well-deserved Number 7 spot on Billboard's country chart and a citation from ROLLING STONE as one of the top fifty albums of the year.
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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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Dusty Strings Hosts Guitar Solo Sessions Online
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 hosting a weekly forum for sharing with other guitarists the solos you're crafting in a unique low-pressure setting "As Best You C." "Each participant typically gets three to four opportunities to play," the website explains, "and all guitar genres and levels are welcome! Meet-ups are on Zoom every Sunday from 2:30 PM to 4:30 PM."
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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Find 1952 Martin 000-18 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 1952 Martin 000-18 acoustic guitar. The website describes it as "an excellent-sounding, player-grade example with a well-loved history. Despite the repairs, this guitar still sounds amazing and plays beautifully with an updated nut and frets for seamless playability. If you're looking for a killer-sounding, vintage 000-18 at a more accessible price, this could be the one. Includes hardshell case."
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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