Merla Haggard died from double pneumonia at 9:20 this morning in Palo Cedro, California, according to his manager, Frank Mull.
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“We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street”, Haggard sang on country radio stations as hundreds of thousands gathered for National Moratorium demonstrations against the Vietnam War, “but we like living right and being free”.
He married five times throughout his almost eight decades of life and welcomed six kids.
“I wound up with nothing to lay on except a Bible and concrete slab”, Haggard said. While the story isn’t autobiographical, it resonated with families around the country, becoming an anthem for those who had to work just to make ends meet.
Haggard’s description of 1969’s “Okie from Muskogee”, perhaps his most famous song, changed over the years.
“I’ll tell you what the public likes more than anything”, he told the Boston Globe in 1999.
In the early “60s, Haggard and his band, The Strangers, helped popularize “the Bakersfield sound” alongside Buck Owens and The Buckaroos”. The special will feature never-before-seen footage and interviews, vintage performance clips and commentary from Haggard himself as well as some of country music’s biggest stars, including Miranda Lambert, Toby Keith, Florida Georgia Line, Vince Gill, Wynonna Judd, Dwight Yoakam, Brooks & Dunn and Bobby Bare. It was 1937, in the middle of the Depression, and Haggard’s parents had relocated to Bakersfield, Calif., after their barn in Oklahoma burned down. Just think of how many selfies people would want to have taken next to a bronze statue of Merle Haggard.
After being convicted of attempted robbery as a teenager, Haggard spent several years in California’s San Quentin State Prison, where he heard Johnny Cash play and was talked out of trying to escape by his fellow inmates, who thought he had a future on the outside as a successful musician.
“Haggard recorded 40 No. 1 country singles, and wrote some of the genre’s most revered classics, which have been recorded by Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, The Byrds, Vince Gill, The Grateful Dead, and countless others”, Thanki writes.
But Haggard’s own perspectives, even when it came to that song, rarely were so cut and dried. Officials in Kern County, where he spent his boyhood years, have since honored his legacy by renaming a portion of road Merle Haggard Drive.
Other songs that weren’t released as singles, including “Today I Started Loving You Again” (perhaps the Haggard song most-covered by other artists) and “Irma Jackson”, about an interracial romance, display Mr. Haggard’s depth as an artist.
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Haggard wrote the foreword to his biography, an early summation of the ingredients of his life and his music. Abbott performs Wednesday night and says Haggard was a huge influence “He may not be here with us anymore, but his songs will live on forever”, he said. “I know his mind is now untangled forever”.
