May, 2025
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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A monthly guide to early rock, blues, country, folk, and traditional jazz in the Seattle area and beyond.
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CONTENTS—May, 2025
PART 20:
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: May Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART 21:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-20:
"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:
⠠⠮ 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. 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, 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.
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.
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 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." Momentously entitled
Last of The Breed,
it was an unintended but worthy follow-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.
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.
The Bluegrass Sessions
was released in October on bluegrass star Del McCoury's McCoury Music label. 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.
"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," Marc Eliot
recounts.
"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. "He resumed concerts regularly," Eliot
relates,
"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
"every time he went out onstage, he gave it everything he had."
In 2015 Merle Haggard's sixth studio collaboration with Willie Nelson was released on Legacy, the Sony Music subsidiary best known for its historical reissue albums. Entitled
Django and Jimmie,
it paid tribute to Haggard's lifelong idol
Jimmie Rodgers
as well as legendary guitarist
Django Reinhardt,
who pioneered the French "Gypsy Jazz" sound with violinist Stephane Grappelli in the 1930's. The effort was rewarded with the Number 1 spot on the Billboard country album chart and the Number 7 position on the magazine's Top 100.
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"Not long after," Eliot
continues,
"Merle's health began another round of decline. After the 2015 holidays, which he spent mostly in the hospital, being treated for what he insisted was double pneumonia but was really the debilitating progression of his lung cancer, he went right back on the road." Nevertheless, a sudden bout of illness forced the cancellation of a benefit show in Palm Springs. "Despite his initial reluctance," his biographer
summarizes,
"Merle was rushed to the Eisenhower Medical Center in nearby Rancho Mirage, where he spent the next eleven days."
"Merle hated hospitals," his old friend Frank Mull explains in Eliot's
book.
"He was afraid of them because he could never forget how his father went into one and never came out."
"I took Merle back and forth from his bus to Eisenhower four times," his old friend Ray McDonald recalls in the
book.
"On one of our outpatient trips, the head doctor came in to see Merle. He said they had developed this new pill that was working wonders and could likely extend his life for months, maybe even years. The doctor pleaded with Merle to let them do a biopsy, but he refused."
Incredibly, Haggard continued to push his luck on the road. "On February 6, 2016," Eliot
Relates,
"Merle was driven back to Las Vegas, where he had promised to play a show at the Mandalay Bay Ballroom. His fee was a reported $250,000 and he needed to catch up on expenses, including paying the band." After four songs, however, he was unable to continue, and contemporary country star Toby Keith, who had come to town to see him and was placed on stand-by, finished the show.
"Merle insisted on trying to do one more show the following week," Eliot
continues,
"on February 13, in San José. He got through the whole show and finished to a standing ovation. He never appeared onstage again. It was clear to everyone around him, and finally to Merle himself, that the end was near."
"In the final years," his manager Lance Roberts adds in the
book,
"Merle had made quite a bit of money, and he was comforted by the fact that everyone in the family would be well taken care of."
A week and a half before he died, Haggard called his old friend and bandmate Ronnie Reno in Nashville. "Before we hung up," Reno
recalls,
"he asked me to sing at his funeral. He had his entire service planned out, with every detail written on paper, as if he were composing a new song, down to the musical soundtrack he wanted to be played."
"Not long after," Eliot
writes,
"Merle told his son Ben that he was going to die on the morning of his seventy-ninth birthday, not a day before, not a day after. And he did. He wasn't alone when he passed. Kelli, his daughter, dropped everything to stay with her dad until the end."
"For Merle Haggard," his biographer
concludes,
"the bad dreams were finally over. He had sung himself back home."
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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 Vintage Gibson Electrics 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 1953 Les Paul goldtop and a 1959 Les Paul standard.
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
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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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