Merle Haggard: The Essential Playlist

"I Never Go Around in Mirrors"

"Are the Good Times Really Over?"

"Yesterday's Wine"

"Who'll Buy The Wine"

"It's My Lazy Day"

"Pancho and Lefty"
The hits slowed down in the 1980s, but the party revved up. After splitting with his third wife, country singer Leona Williams, Haggard moved onto a houseboat on Lake Shasta. In 1983, he bought a stake in the Silverthorn Resort, a marina with a cafe, bait shop and nightclub. He hosted wet-T-shirt contests, slept all day and fished at night. "I had my toothbrush tied to the boat and let it dangle in the water," Haggard wrote in My House of Memories. "We drank cayenne-pepper drinks and wore very little clothes. . . . There were lots of drugs, women, good friends, good music and fun."

Around this time, Haggard and his buddy Willie Nelson recorded Pancho and Lefty, a laid-back album about boozing, chasing girls and skipping out on responsibilities to go fishing — with a hint of the fallout to come. "We were living pretty hard in that time period," says Nelson. The album's finest track, a cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," was cut after four in the morning. Haggard had already gone to bed, Nelson says, but they needed him for the final verse. "We went over to the condo, woke up ol' Merle and said, 'It's your turn.' "

Haggard's verse on "Pancho and Lefty" is one of his greatest performances — strong, unsentimental, yet conveying all the tragedy of the lyrics about the inevitable bad end that can come from a life of rambling. "Merle is a genial old boy," says Nelson. "He did it about half in his sleep, but Hag sings pretty good in his sleep."

"Wishing All These Old Things Were New"

"If I Could Only Fly"

"Always Late"

"More Than My Old Guitar"

"Learning To Live With Myself"

"Blues Stay Away From Me"