Patrick Haggerty (photo by Sarah Wainwright)
Pioneering country artist Patrick Haggerty, known for releasing the first gay country album in 1973, passed away Monday at home in Bremerton, Washington, from complications following a stroke. He was 78 years old.
Lavender Country was intended by Haggerty to be a viral message, long before the internet. Recorded in Seattle during the gay rights movement, and involving members of that movement, Lavender Country was a visceral, furious, beautiful, and loving album that told of the experience of being gay in America at a time when this was not widely accepted. Sold via mail order, copies of Lavender Country were passed around informally, hidden in houses and apartments from spouses and family.
“We were desperate to get out valid information about who we were, and the album enabled us to distribute information anywhere, to anyone who would order it,” Haggerty explained in this 2014 interview, one of two I conducted over the years while working with Haggerty and his record labels.
Haggerty was booted from the Peace Corps in the 1960s when his relationship with a fellow Peace Corps member was discovered, and as he began expressing his sexuality more openly his family placed him in a mental hospital. Following the Stonewall riots in 1969, Haggerty publicly came out, as he described it, by running through the streets of Missoula, Montana, screaming his truth. Challenged that night by the leader of a local motorcycle club who wanted to beat him up, Haggerty stood up for himself and was adopted by the club, joining them on rides and crediting them for saving his life as an openly gay man in a conservative rural town.
A raconteur, Haggerty loved to tell stories like these, and with a life fueled by activism and resistance, he had a near endless store of unbelievable tales. Some of those stories made it into the songs of Lavender Country and its recent sequel, Blackberry Rose (ND review). For Blackberry Rose, Haggerty wrote “Clara Fraser” about a socialist co-worker who was fired in the ’70s, and “Gay Bar Blues” about his first experience at a gay bar in Spokane in 1967, at a time when police officers would routinely watch gay bar entrances to either raid them or report people to their spouses and employers.
Of all his stories, Haggerty’s most beloved were about his father, Charles Edward Haggerty, who was a dairy farmer on a 100-acre tenant farm outside Port Angeles, Washington. In a tale that was animated by StoryCorps in a viral video from 2015, Haggerty remembers an assembly at his high school when he was discovering his sexuality and running for head cheerleader. Though covered in glitter and face paint himself, he hid from his father because he was embarrassed by his father’s filthy work clothes. His father confronted him, and Haggerty admitted to hiding. His father, who knew that Haggerty wasn’t going to be dating the local girls, told him, “Don’t sneak,” and urged him to be proud of who he was and not hide it. It was a lesson that resonated with Haggerty for the rest of his life.
‘Why Not Country?’
Born in 1944, Haggerty grew up on an Olympic Peninsula dairy farm. He was exposed to hard work and country music early on, listening to classics like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, dancing in local grange halls, and practicing on a $25 guitar his dad bought him.
Arriving in Seattle in 1970, Haggerty was welcomed into the gay rights movement, starting off with Gay Liberation Front meetings and continuing into paid social work. When he set about creating the Lavender Country album in 1973, he was able to meld the country music of his youth with the messages and philosophy of gay rights. “There wasn’t any other genre in 1973 that was going to embrace gay music … so why not country?” Haggerty told me during one of our interviews.
The most recent lineup of Lavender Country, with Patrick Haggerty at center (photo by Sarah Wainwright)
Haggerty wrote most of the songs on Lavender Country and assembled the band from local friends and activists. He received funding from the nonprofit Gay Community Social Services of Seattle and drew inspiration from other gay activists, including Faygele Ben–Miriam. The songs were so viscerally honest and open that they remain as powerful and raw today as when they were first recorded.
Haggerty and friends toured as Lavender Country for some years afterwards, but he drifted on to other projects, some even more radical. In Oregon in the ’70s he faced down a pickup truck full of armed bigots with a rifle of his own at a radical gay rights conference. A lifelong “screaming Marxist bitch,” as he described himself, Haggerty spent a brief time in Cuba, advocating for gay rights and cutting sugarcane. Back in the States, he raised two children and performed songs of the labor movement with his duo, The Landlord Tenant Act. With his husband, J.B. Broughton, Haggerty built a life for himself in Bremerton, Washington, a small seaside Navy town a ferry’s ride away from downtown Seattle and less than two hours from where he grew up.
In 1999, the Gay Community Social Services organization re-released Lavender Country on CD. The album began to get greater acclaim after a scholarly article in The Journal of Country Music, and it was entered into the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame as the first gay country album. Still, the album was little known. It took a reissue on LP and CD by indie record label Paradise of Bachelors in 2014 before Lavender Country received national acclaim.
Haggerty began to tour again and became an elder figure to a new generation of queer country singers. He received accolades like Nashville Pride’s 2017 Trailblazer Award, and was fêted by and collaborated with queer country stars like Orville Peck and Trixie Mattel. In 2020, Haggerty released Blackberry Rose, featuring new songs and guest artists as well as a few older songs that weren’t able to be included on Lavender Country.
In his later years, Haggerty struggled at times in the role of a queer icon. He loved the spotlight, the attention, and the recognition, but he firmly believed that the real icons were those that passed away during the AIDS epidemic, the generation of powerful queer leaders that were lost to governmental and public indifference. “They’re all dead, and I’m an icon, and it’s just not right,” he told me through tears in an interview earlier this year.
At the end of his live shows, Haggerty loved to sing “Lavender Country,” with its refrain of “Y’all come out, come out you hear, to Lavender Country.” A song of hope and inclusion, Haggerty meant it for all, gay or straight. His husband, J.B., would weave through the audience, pulling people off chairs and pushing them to dance, while Haggerty roamed the crowd with a handheld microphone, getting personal with his message of love, unchanged from those days in Seattle when he wrote the song amid protesting in the streets and dedicating his life to creating change.
