Merle Haggard

One of country music's most gifted and prolific songwriters, Merle Haggard symbolizes the American workingman - dignified, downtrodden, and not unlikely to visit the neighborhood bar - of whom he often sings. He is also a staunch upholder of musical traditions, particularly Western swing, and he leads one of country music's most improvisatory bands. Though an outspoken critic of the Nashville star system, Haggard was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994; that same year he was feted with two simultaneous tribute albums, one consisting of country superstars, the other a group of rootsy country mavericks. Haggard himself fits equally into both camps.

Haggard was born to a family of transplanted Oklahomans who were living in a converted boxcar in California. When he was nine, his father died of a brain tumor. He quit school in the eighth grade and hopped a freight train at age 14. Through the end of his teens, he mostly roamed the Southwest. Haggard had been in and out of reformatories - from which he frequently escaped - by the age of 14 for such petty crimes as car theft. A 20-year-old married father, he was arrested for breaking into a cafe (drunk, he thought the booming business was closed) and spent nearly three years in San Quentin. He was paroled in 1960. (In 1972 then–California governor Ronald Reagan expunged Haggard's criminal record, granting him a full pardon.)

After prison, Haggard went back to Bakersfield and worked for his brother digging ditches. He started playing lead guitar in a local country band, and by 1962, when he went to Las Vegas to back singer Wynn Stewart, Haggard had decided to make music his career.

In 1963 he formed an enduring partnership with Lewis Talley and Fuzzy Owens, the owners of Tally Records, an independent label in the Bakersfield area for which Haggard made his early recordings. In 1963 Haggard’s first release sold only 200 copies, but his second, “Sing Me a Sad Song,” made #19 on the Billboard country chart. He recorded with Tally through 1965, and Owens remains one of Haggard’s close associates. But after Haggard’s third solo single “(All My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers” hit the C&W Top 10, he was signed by Capitol.

Haggard formed his own backing group, the Strangers, with whom he began touring an average of about 200 nights a year. (The Strangers released their first album of instrumentals in 1970.) After Haggard’s first marriage ended in divorce, he married Buck Owens’ ex-wife, singer Bonnie Owens. He had previously recorded with her for Tally, but their duet career began in earnest with their first joint Capitol LP, Just Between the Two of Us (#4 C&W, 1965). They shared hit records, tours, and awards until their divorce in 1978. (A few years later, Owens returned to touring and recording as a backup singer with Haggard.)

In 1966 “Swinging Doors” and “The Bottle Let Me Down” hit the Top 5 on the country chart, and later in the year “The Fugitive” became his first country #1. He has amassed more than 100 country chart singles since - including 38 #1 hits - and had at least one Top 5 country hit every year between 1966 and 1987. Among his biggest hits are “Mama Tried,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Hungry Eyes,” “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad),” “Everybody’s Had the Blues,” “If We Make It Through December,” “It’s All in the Movies,” and “Big City.” Of the hundreds of songs he’s written, many have become country standards (his “Today I Started Loving You Again” has been recorded by more than 400 artists). Haggard became a controversial figure during the Vietnam War era by extolling the virtues of patriotism in “The Fightin’ Side of Me” and “Okie From Muskogee.”

But Haggard was more a traditionalist than a hard-line conservative. His many recordings - more than 65 albums since 1963 - include a tribute to Western swing pioneer Bob Wills (A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World); a gospel tribute, The Land of Many Churches, which included backing from the Carter Family; I Love Dixie Blues, a 1973 tribute to Dixieland jazz recorded in New Orleans; and Same Train, a Different Time, in honor of his first idol, Jimmie Rodgers. He played at the White House in 1973 for President Nixon and his family, and later for the Reagans at their California ranch. His music was part of the Apollo 16 mission to the moon, per the crew’s request.

In 1978 he married one of his backup singers, Leona Williams; that marriage also ended in divorce. (Briefly married for a fourth time, he married again in the early ’90s. He has two young children with his fifth wife, and, with his first, three grown children, two of whom have pursued country-music careers.) In 1981 Haggard published an autobiography (cowritten with Peggy Russell), Sing Me Back Home.

An occasional actor as well as singer, he appeared on TV in The Waltons and Centennial. He made his movie debut in 1968’s Killer Three and was featured the next year in From Nashville With Music. In 1980 he made a cameo appearance in Bronco Billy, singing a duet with Clint Eastwood, “Bar Room Buddies” (#1 C&W, 1980). In addition to Bonnie Owens and Leona Williams, Haggard has also recorded duets with both George Jones and Willie Nelson.

Haggard’s hits began to wind down in the late ’80s as the new “hat acts” began to monopolize the country chart. After 25 years on the road, Haggard curtailed touring to an extent, spending more time on his ranch near Lake Shasta. Just after the release of his first album in four years, 1994, Arista/Nashville issued Mama’s Hungry Eyes: A Tribute to Merle Haggard, with tracks by Clint Black, Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, and Alabama, among others. Concurrently, the independent, California-based label Hightone released Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Merle Haggard, with contributions from Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, Joe Ely, John Doe (X), Dave Alvin (the Blasters), Billy Joe Shaver, and others. In October 1994 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

While the music industry lauded Haggard with awards, tribute albums, and lavish reissues (the most expansive being 1996’s career-spanning, four-disc Capitol box set, Down Every Road), Haggard felt he was given short shift by his label, Curb. After both his 1994 and 1996 albums were issued with near identical, nondescript cover art and released with virtually no promotion, Haggard left Curb Records. His 1999 autobiography, Merle Haggard’s House of Memories: For the Record, was accompanied in stores by a double-disc collection of rerecorded versions of his greatest hits, For the Record: 43 Legendary Hits. A handful of the songs featured Haggard dueting with the varied likes of Willie Nelson, Brooks and Dunn, and pop singer Jewel; his new version of his 1984 #1 hit “That’s the Way Love Goes” with Jewel reached #56 on the country singles chart.

If that collaboration raised eyebrows, it was nothing compared to his signing in 2000 to the independent Anti Records, distributed by punk label Epitaph. His Anti debut, If I Could Only Fly., received widespread critical acclaim and peaked at #26 on the C&W chart. Also in 2000, Haggard recorded a pair of gospel albums, Cabin in the Hills and Two Old Friends (with Albert E. Brumley Jr.), which he sold exclusively on his Web site and in Wal-Mart stores.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)