Country music stalwart Merle Haggard dies aged 79

Merle Haggard, the working man’s troubadour of country music who carried the flame for the Bakersfield Sound for more than half a century, died on Wednesday – his 79th birthday – at his home near Redding, in Shasta County, California.

Haggard had struggled with double pneumonia for several months. His manager confirmed his death to the Associated Press. Haggard became a household name after his song Okie From Muskogee hit No 1 in 1969, a cranky Vietnam era anthem that disparaged hippies, free love and the coming Zeitgeist with lyrics like:

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/ 
We don't take our trips on LSD/
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street/
Cause we like living right and being free.

He released more than 80 albums and scored 38 country chart-topping singles with such songs as I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, Mama Tried, Hungry Eyes, The Roots of My Raising and Big City.

The Country Music Hall of Fame star had the voice of every man and an endearingly grizzled worldview. Despite his impoverished upbringing on the outskirts of Bakersfield, his music carried a nationalistic, conservative streak. In Workin’ Man Blues, he sang, Hey, hey, the workin’ man, the workin’ man like me/I ain’t never been on welfare, and that’s one place I won’t be.

“Haggard’s songs ring like literature with the voice of a great writer,” wrote former Chronicle critic Joel Selvin. “The world of his songs is a dark, forbidding place, filled with regret, loneliness and sorrow.”

Merle Ronald Haggard was born April 6th, 1937 in Oildale, California. The son of Oklahoma dust bowl refugees, he grew up in the settlements on the outskirts of Bakersfield in a boxcar his father James Haggard, a carpenter with the Santa Fe railroad, converted into a home for the family during the Depression.

“When they moved out there in ’37, it was very common in those days to buy the railroad cars that they were setting off,” Haggard told the Chronicle. “Dad found this vacant lot. There was an old refrigerator car just sittin’ on it. He made a deal with the lady that owned it to buy it if he was to make it into a home. Made a very good home, by the way, because the walls were 10 inches thick.’’

His father died from a brain hemorrhage when Haggard was nine years old, an event that in his 1999 autobiography, My House of Memories, he said put his life into a tailspin. He hopped his first freight train the following year, setting out on a life marked by juvenile delinquency, multiple incarcerations and five marriages. He was locked up when his first two children were born, and served three years in San Quentin for trying to burglarize a roadhouse (Haggard was granted a full pardon of his criminal record in 1972 by California governor Ronald Reagan).

He also picked up the guitar at age 12, inspired by the honky-tonk of Hank Williams and the mournful ballads of Jimmie Rodgers. Following his release from prison, Haggard put out his first record in 1963 for the Tally label, helping push forward the Bakersfield Sound, a bare-knuckled strain of the genre born out of dusty regional honky tonks, as a reaction to the overproduced country and Western music coming out of Nashville.

‘Goddamned glad’

He signed with Capitol Records in 1965, recording his first No 1 song, I’m a Lonesome Fugitive. After his prime run of hit songs about heartbreak, outlaws and drifters, Haggard became an elder statesmen of the country music world, and a vocal critic of the contemporary strains of the genre.

“I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t listen to it,” he said in an interview with the Chronicle. “And I’m goddamned glad they don’t play my s*** along with that other crap.” Following a dispute with his label over the 1989 recording “Me and Crippled Soldiers Give a Damn,” a rejoinder to the Supreme Court’s decision to allow flag burning under the First Amendment, Haggard’s career hit a speed bump. In 2000, he made a comeback album of sorts for punk-rock label Anti- Records, If I Could Only Fly; and took on the music of his boyhood on Roots the next year.

He briefly renewed his lifelong association with Capitol Records in 2004 to cut Unforgettable, a fine set of pop standards, done honky-tonk style, that he’d learned working bars at the beginning of his career. “You played hillbilly, you played ‘Stardust,’ ” he said. “You played it for them or you didn’t have the f****** job.’’

He also cut a bluegrass album, gospel albums and recorded with George Jones, Willie Nelson and Ray Price. In February, Haggard scrapped a performance minutes before taking the stage in Riverside, California, telling fans: “Sadly I’m just not strong enough yet.”

He was first diagnosed with pneumonia in both lungs in December, after he had difficulty breathing during a performance, telling Rolling Stone, “It was like suffocating, like having a pillow in your face. It’s a terrible thing; people die from it all the time.”

Haggard battled lung cancer in 2008 and underwent follow-up surgery in 2015 to correct complications from the initial surgery to remove a lemon-sized tumour from his lung. The same year, Haggard’s duets album with Willie Nelson, Django and Jimmie, debuted at the top of the Billboard Country Albums chart, and in the No 7 spot on the all-genre Billboard 200.

Having declared bankruptcy in the early 1990s while $5 million in debt, he stayed on the road, playing small clubs and county fairs. He played an estimated 125 concerts annually with his 10-piece band, the Strangers, and once told the Chronicle that he didn’t have a fixed address.

“Can’t find any use for one,” said Haggard. “I used to have one. I got a cabin at the lake on Shasta. I got a studio just outside of Redding, just south of Shasta. I have a padded cell in this Greyhound bus. That’s about it.”

He is survived by his fifth wife, Theresa; sons, Noel, Marty and Ben; and daughters, Dana, Kelli, Jenessa.

(New York Times)