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Songs of pain
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Merle Haggard's music was a reflection of the desolation around him
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To refugees from the "dustbowl" (read Oklahoma) to the "land of milk and honey" in California, a baby was born in a converted boxcar. His view of life would be shaped by the misery he saw around him, after his father (who worked on the Santa Fe railway) died when he was nine.
Many of Merle Haggard's songs — "Mama's hungry eyes", "They're tearin' the labour camps down" and "California Cottonfields", were pages from a painful past. If not in roaming the southwest, he was in and out of reform school, despite his religious Christian mother, whose efforts he penned in song "Mama tried". Married when only 17 to Leona Hobbs, he provided for his four children through manual labour and armed robbery.
Jailed for nearly three years in San Quentin Penitentiary, a Johnny Cash concert in the compound led him to joining the prison band. On his release, he returned to his native Bakersfield and dug ditches for his brother before playing lead guitar in a local band that backed singer Wynn Stewart. Haggard's first release in 1963 sold only 200 copies but his "Sing me a sad song" touched No. 19 on the Billboard Country Charts. He was signed up by Capitol records after "All my friends are gonna be strangers" reached the Country and Western Top 10. His prolific song writing fetched him as many as 38 No. 1 hits.
Haggard courted controversy during the Vietnam War era professing his patriotism through "The fighting side of me" and "Okie from Muskogee", which ridiculed draft card burning and flower power. Not surprisingly, he became President Richard Nixon's favourite musician and Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, gave him a full pardon for his past misdemeanours.
Two more marriages later, his autobiography with Peggy Russell, Sing Me Back Home, was published. "Bar room buddies", a duet with Clint Eastwood topped the C & W charts in 1980. His second autobiography in 1999, Merle Haggard's House of Memories: For The Record offered alongside For The Record: 43 Legendary Hits, a double-disc compilation, comprising rerecorded versions of his greatest hits.
Over the decades he has come to symbolise the American worker, downtrodden but dignified.
A. GEORGE ANTONY
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