Booking Merle Haggard

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Merle Haggard’s Biography

The word legend usually makes an appearance at some point when discussing Merle Haggard. It’s an acknowledgment of his artist,ry and his standing as the poet of the common man. It’s a tribute to his incredible commercial success and to the lasting mark he has made, not just on country music, but on American music as a whole. Haggard’s real gift is that anyone who hears his songs recognizes the truth in them.

As a result, Haggard found his songs at the top of the charts on a regular basis. Immediately embraced by country fans, he also earned the respect of his peers. In addition to 40 #1 hits, Haggard has charted scores of Top Ten songs. He won just about every music award imaginable, both as a performer and as a songwriter, and in 1994 was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Merle Ronald Haggard was born in 1937, outside Bakersfield, California. His parents, Jim and Flossie, moved the family there after their farm in Oklahoma burned down, with Jim finding work as a carpenter for the Santa Fe Railroad. The family lived in an old boxcar that they converted into a home, he hopped a freight train when he was just ten years old.

The angel on his shoulder during these troubled times was Haggard’s love and talent for music. Starting out as a fan of Bob Wills, Haggard eventually found his musical idol in Lefty Frizzell, and worked up a pretty impressive copy of the original’s singing style. For three or four years I didn’t sing anything but Lefty Frizzell songs, Merle told Music City News. And then, because Lefty was a fan of Jimmie Rodgers, I learned to imitate him too. Haggard got the chance to see Lefty perform in person when he was 14.

In and out of jail over the years for small crimes, he found himself doing serious time in San Quentin at the age of 20. Released from San Quentin in 1960, he joined the then thriving Bakersfield country scene, which eschewed the smooth country-politan sound coming out of Nashville for a harder-hitting honky-tonk groove.

After making an impression working in local clubs, Haggard joined Las Vegas star Wynn Stewart’s band in 1962 as a bassist. When he got a chance to record his own single, Haggard chose the Stewart composition, Sing A Sad Song. It came out on the small Tally Records label in 1964, and made it into the Top Twenty. His follow up singles didn’t do quite as well, until (My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers went into the Top Ten and brought him to the attention of Capitol Records. He proved himself a hit maker with three Top Ten singles in 1967, including his first #1, The Fugitive.

Haggard knew firsthand what it was like to be on the run. In some ways, he may have felt that he was in that same situation again. Here he’d successfully turned his life around, and he realized that his criminal past might now come back to slap him down. He made those feelings clear less than a year later in his next #1, Branded Man .

Haggard said Johnny Cash encouraged him to address his problems directly in verse. When Cash introduced him on his variety show, he said, Here’s a man who writes about his own life and has had a life to write about.

Sing Me Back Home, another #1 in 1967, was written for his old friend Rabbit, who was executed after his escape plan led to the death of a prison guard. Mama Tried, which reached the top of the chart in 1968, offered an apology of sorts to Haggard’s religious and hardworking mother, absolving her of blame for his bad behavior. His 1969 hit Hungry Eyes, a heartrending portrait of a family in poverty, includes a line about a canvas-covered cabin, a reference to the home of the great aunt and uncle he stayed with as a boy. Working Man Blues, which came out in 1969, may have appealed to the rock crowd because of its hard-driving beat and its anti-elitism, but it delivered a clear message of solidarity to the blue collar country audience.That political stance was solidified with Haggard’s most popular song, Okie From Muskogee.

In 1972, he released I Wonder If They Ever Think Of Me, which revisits Vietnam via the thoughts of a P.O.W., while 1973 ås If We Make It Through December crystallized the worries of an unemployed father at a time when much of the U.S. was feeling the effects of a particularly difficult recession. Of course, Haggard also wrote about more cheerful issues. Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man) in 1971, and Grandma Harp in 1972, both express his joy in music and how it saved him in low times.

Though the hits slowed down a bit in the following decades, Haggard never stopped making music. He started producing his own cuts for the first time, and My Favorite Memory and Big City, went to #1 in 1981. The next year he and George Jones made an album together, with their duet Yesterday’s Wine, reaching the top of the chart. Teaming up with another legend-in-the-making, Willie Nelson, Haggard scored again with the 1983 hit Pancho and Lefty. In 1987, he scored his last #1, Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star.