Inside Merle Haggard’s Final Years

Onstage, he’d sometimes launch into a song he’d written on the bus that day, with no rehearsal or warning to his band, the Strangers. Whenever he had the chance, he would rather make mistakes trying something new than go through the motions of playing the same song the same way twice.

He was like that in conversation, too. He couldn’t help but dig deep, search for new meanings, even when the discoveries were painful. One night, Merle took me for a ride in his golf cart and stopped on a ridge overlooking his 200-acre property. He told me he recently realized that he’d spent most of his life on the run “from the authorities and mostly from myself,” and he choked up when he said his biggest ambition now was to “stand still and face where I’m at.

“I’m a nomad,” he said. “But this property and my family, that’s what it really comes down to for me now. They need me, and I hope I have a little time to enjoy them.”

If Merle’s thinking sometimes carried a conspiratorial edge, it was also often prophetic. “I’m here to tell you, boys, things aren’t going well in this country and they’re getting worse,” he shouted one day on his tour bus, as we passed toxic burning rice fields on the highway outside Sacramento. “I’m not sure we can turn it around. I got to think that one of these days somebody’s going to fight back. I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but it’s coming, and when it does, all hell is going to break loose. I’m talking like I mean it, ’cause I’m scared.

“The spirit of the American people is the only thing that can save America,” he said. “Not the spirit of America, the spirit of the American people. If we rise up and take this country back, as we’ve done in the past – that’s our only hope.”

Haggard had undergone surgery not long before to remove the tumor on his lung, and he told me he’d been more scared than he let on. “You know, you always think you’re going to be the one that does all right. I was supposed to be on the table by 7:30 that morning, but it was 9:30 before they started because I had a lot of questions. The guy’s hands were awful big, the main surgeon. I said, ‘Don’t you have to make a bigger hole than most guys?’ He said, ‘No, I’m not going in there with my hands.’ But it’s quite a procedure. They have to come in through the back, break out a couple of bars, and you don’t get those back.

“I was probably ready to go, you know. I’d done about everything I knew how to do. But to get an extension is always nice.”

As Merle talked, his saxophonist, Don Markham, who has played in the Strangers since 1969, sat nearby. A mutual friend had died the day before. “Don said, ‘You know, we’re gonna be doing that in the next few years,'” Merle recounted, with a barking laugh. “I thought about that all night, Don. I thought you could have said the next few hours and probably been right.”

“Doin’ what?” Markham replied. “I don’t remember what I said.”

“Dyin’!” Merle shouted. “Everybody’s doin’ it!” 

One of the last times I visited merle was just before Christmas in 2012, at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, where he had booked two concerts to close out the year. He was lounging in a two-story suite, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a gold-plated staircase. His fox terrier, Fanny, the same breed he’d kept since he was a kid, sat on his lap as he picked tracks for a duet album to be sold at Cracker Barrel. As usual, Merle had plans stacked up: an album of Dylan covers, a possible biopic (“Something honest, none of that corny shit”), and one thing I’d never heard him talk about before – a vacation.