MARCH, 2025
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—March, 2025
PART 19:
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: March Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART 19:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-18:
"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. 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,
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.
After an unsuccessful stint with Curb Records, 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,
his fiftieth studio album, was released October 10, 2000 and became an immediate hit. It stayed on the Billboard country chart for four months and peaked at Number 23, doing better than a Haggard album had done since 1987's
Chill Factor.
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.
Thompson. If "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," Haggard's honky-tonk heroes were spectacularly well flattered both vocally and instrumentally. 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, and when artist and label couldn't come to an agreement on a follow-up album or a new contract, he went out on his own without much success.
Returning to Capitol in 2004, he released
Unforgettable,
a collection of American Songbook pop standards similar in concept to Willie Nelson's 1978
Stardust
album. 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, but when they were pitched too high, his voice just sounded strained and tired. Still, the album reached Number 39 on the Billboard country chart.
"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.” 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. Momentously entitled
Last of The Breed,
it 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.
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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In August 2007 Haggard engaged traditionalist country star Marty Stuart, who was one of his greatest admirers, and former Strangers member Ronnie Reno for a bluegrass album project. With Reno, son of bluegrass pioneer Don Reno, as producer and Stuart on mandolin and lead guitar,
The Bluegrass Sessions
was released in October on bluegrass star Del McCoury's McCoury Music label in association with Hag Records.
Recorded at Ricky Skaggs' studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, it conveyed the mood of a relaxed but masterful jam session of A-list bluegrassers. The material ranged from a composite of
Jimmie Rodgers
blues lyrics to a selection of standout songs from Haggard's vast catalog to some new and equally good originals. Reflecting his pleasure in presenting his new songs and reimagining his older ones with wonderfully compatible accompanists, his voice sounded ten years younger on this album. Although it rose no higher than Number 43 on Billboard's country chart and Number 34 on its Independent Album list, it was one of Merle Haggard's greatest albums of all time.
"Merle returned to his ranch feeling on top of the world," his biographer
summarizes.
"All seemed right again in his world, until the bottom fell out again from under him. In late October 2008, seventy-one-year-old Merle underwent a biopsy at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, which revealed he was suffering from "non-small-cell lung cancer”. Surgery was recommended, and against the advice of close friends and family, Merle refused, insisting there was nothing wrong with him. But there was."
"Not long after the biopsy," Marc Eliot
continues,
"Merle started feeling discomfort in his chest, and had to be almost dragged by family and friends back to the clinic. The tumor was discovered, and it wasn't tiny at all. Merle underwent surgery to have it removed at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital. On Monday, November 4, doctors removed the upper lobe of his right lung. He didn't perform again until January 2009.”
In December 2010, Merle Haggard was presented, along with Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey, with a Kennedy Center Honor in Washington DC for lifetime achievement. "At his lowest," manager Lance Robert summarizes in Eliot's
book,
"he was barely able to get bookings at county fairs for a handful of people. By 2010, we had helped to bring him back to the highest point of his long career. After he'd opened for Dylan, we were getting him booked in high-end venues everywhere. In show business, everyone goes through peaks and valleys, but when Merle came back, he went to the top of Pike's Peak."
"Merle was determined to keep going, convinced he could still do it," his biographer
writes.
"He resumed concerts regularly, until, in 2012, at the age of seventy-six, his failing health began to make it difficult for him to perform, and he turned cranky and fatalistic."
Nevertheless, his old friend Frank Mull points out in Eliot's
book,
"every time he went out onstage, he gave it everything he had. He played each show like it was the most important one in his career."
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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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