Toss that handful of political songs aside, and a very different — a richer, more eloquent, more enduring — Merle Haggard emerges. As a child of the late depression (born April 6, 1937), his instincts, like those of one of his mentors, Johnny Cash, have always been to sing for and about those in the margins: the working poor, the imprisoned, the love-torn.
The roots of his raising have made for easy cliche. His family joined the migration from Oklahoma to California, where his father found work near Bakersfield as a carpenter for the railroad. Company housing was a converted boxcar, a fact that shows up in even the shortest biographical essay because it explains his fascination with Jimmie Rodgers and several albums of train songs.
By the standards of the late 1930s, that boxcar may not have been such a bad place — probably a good bit nicer than the migrant housing down the road, and no less primitive than the simple homes small farmers had built across the San Joaquin Valley. Still, listen to him sing that opening line from the mostly autobiographical “Mama Tried”: “The first thing I remember knowin’ was a lonesome whistle blowin’.”
His father died when Merle was nine, and his mother took work as a bookkeeper. Merle shortly went wild, beginning a long run to and from government custody (seven escapes, all told), and pursuing a career in petty crime legendary for its ineptitude. An older brother and a younger sister made other choices.
Like many gifted songwriters, Haggard soon found he was suited to no other career, not even a life of crime. As the story goes, he and a friend were drunk and broke (and presumably operating without a watch) when they decided to break into a club and take the night’s receipts. They were discovered trying to pry open the back door at an hour patrons were still walking through the front.
Haggard slipped away from jail and returned to the hotel room where his first wife was waiting. It proved an expensive visit, for the escape was what caused him to be sentenced to San Quentin. And so it was that Johnny Cash, on January 1, 1958 — nearly a decade before he would record “A Boy Named Sue” there — headlined an eight-hour variety show at San Quentin, giving Merle Haggard a glimpse of a different future.
Not that Haggard hadn’t previously considered music as a career. “I got onstage when I was 14,” Haggard says. “I guess I had my sights already set then, I just didn’t realize that I was adamant about it. When I saw Johnny Cash, I’d already formed an opinion about the whole scene of music, and wasn’t really a terrifically big Johnny Cash fan, wasn’t really a fan of Johnny Cash at all.
“I just knew who he was, and I played lead guitar, so I played Luther’s licks because they were nice licks. A lot of people kinda laughed at us country boys that they figured liked him. Well, when he came, he didn’t have a voice. He’d sung his voice off the night before in San Francisco. And he just stood up there and totally waxed that audience, without much more than a whisper.”
Haggard was paroled from San Quentin in 1960. He dug ditches for his brother’s electrical contracting business, then found a better job playing bass for Wynn Stewart. Two years later, following an introduction from Buck and Bonnie Owens, he cut his first singles for Fuzzy Owens’ Talley Records. The fifth single, “(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers”, went top-10 in 1965, Ken Nelson came calling from Capitol, and a star was born.
Johnny Cash knew who Merle Haggard was the next time they were in the same room. “It was 1964, or ’63, maybe,” as Haggard remembers things. “I went to do a show in Chicago with multiple artists on it, a gang of people. He was on it, I was on it, and we met in the restroom, down below the Chicago studios where we were doing a television show. He offered me a double dot, a little old green Dexedrine pill, and a drink of wine. He had this flask underneath his big black coat.
“That was back in the days where everybody was taking those little pills, everybody from the church lady to the truck driver. So there wasn’t nothin’ thought about it, but that was the first time I met him. We went on to be extremely close friends. I think he would have knocked somebody down had they badmouthed me, and vice versa.”
Enough of politics, of lurid legends and oft-told stories, for they only serve to obscure the real work. Haggard’s greatest gift is a knack for vividly exploring the forces that can bring people together, and dramatizing what tears them apart.
Consider the simple, eloquent dignity of “If We Make It Through December”. Haggard is the poet laureate of the broken-hearted, able to articulate feelings of total hopelessness with an honestly and crippling regret in his voice that not even Hank Williams could conjure from his pathetic, lonely life.
This side of Hag is not for the fragile. Listen well, but if you aren’t careful you may catch a glimpse of something within your own soul that you imagined long forgotten and well-buried. No matter how dark your darkest night was, Hag’s was darker. Heart broken? No contest. Just hear the man sing, “What Am I Going To Do (With The Rest Of My Life)?”
“I’m a man that goes through…I have terrible mood swings,” he says, picking through his words before he speaks. “I’m like other people that I have read about that are…gifted in some way and have the capability or mentality to be crazy, to be deeply depressed. I have all those problems to deal with.”
