JANUARY, 2024
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
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CONTENTS—JANUARY, 2024
PART NINE: MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN, OUT THE SOUNDS: JANUARY MUSIC CALENDAR (next message)
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Part Nine:
MERLE HAGGARD: New Biography Chronicles The Life of One of Country Music's Most Complex Legends
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-8:
"Merle Haggard has always been as deep as it gets," Bob Dylan once said. "He's probably one of our greatest living songwriters." He died on his 79th birthday—April 6, 2016—at his ranch in Shasta County, California, but his legend lives on, and it's the subject of a new biography by Marc Eliot. It's entitled
The Hag:
The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard.
Merle Ronald Haggard was born on the morning of April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield, California and raised in the working-class suburb of Oildale. His father had been a popular fiddler during his youth in Oklahoma at local dances and weddings, and it soon became obvious that his penchant for music had been passed on to his infant son. Lying in his bassinet, Merle would keep time with his feet whenever country music played on the radio.
Of all the artists he heard in early childhood, his two favorites were "Mississippi Blue Yodeler"
Jimmie Rodgers
and
Bob Wills,
who popularized western swing with his Texas Playboys. In 1951, at age 14, Haggard discovered another country artist who made a deep impression: up-and-coming singer/songwriter
Lefty Frizzell,
whom he saw for the first time at Bakersfield's Rainbow Gardens.
A pivotal point in young Merle's life had come years earlier when his older brother Lowell, who had moved out on his own and taken a job at a filling station, brought him a cheap Sears Roebuck guitar that a customer had given him in exchange for two dollars' worth of gas. After his father taught him a few chords, Haggard took the proverbial football and ran with it, figuring out more chords by playing along with the records in the family collection. Eventually, he was writing his own songs.
On June 19th, 1946, Jim Haggard died from a stroke that may have been brought on by a head injury from a car accident a month earlier, and the loss had a devastating effect on his young son. "He thought there must have been some connection between his own recent illness and his father's stroke," Eliot explains. "He soon transformed that guilt into a thirst for adventure."
The adventures began when, at age eleven, he hopped a freight train with another boy despite the fact that as the son of a Southern Pacific employee, he was entitled to ride as a passenger whenever he wanted. Three years later, Haggard was still cutting classes most of the time and hopping freights whenever he could.
When 14-year-old Merle Haggard returned to school in September 1951, Eliot recounts, "it took only nine days before he decided he'd had enough, even if the truant officers, all of whom knew his name, came looking for him." A family court judge sent him to the Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility for Boys, where he endured a year of very harsh treatment. After another long truancy, the same judge pronounced him incorrigible and sent him to a much stricter facility.
"He was sixteen by the time he was released, tougher than ever and hardly reformed," Eliot writes. Nevertheless, Merle Haggard was soon to get the first big break of his teenage life the following January when
Lefty Frizzell
returned to the Rainbow Gardens. It was then that he met his idol through singer/steel guitarist Billy Mize, a well-known figure in local country-music circles whose band was opening for Frizzell. "I got to use his guitar and have his band play behind me," Haggard later said. "It was quite a thrill."
When Mize invited him to appear on his new local TV show, it appeared to young Merle Haggard that nothing could stop him from realizing his dream of a career in country music. "He was wrong," Marc Eliot
writes.
"He hadn't counted on the brick wall of self-destruction that stood in his way."
Haggard took menial jobs by day but spent his evenings sitting in with local country bands, and in two years he had built a reputation as a solid rhythm guitarist and was picking up regular work. Nevertheless, one evening over a beer with a co-worker, the conversation turned to stealing cars, and at his suggestion, they searched for an unlocked vehicle, intending to cross the Nevada line, avail themselves of the state's legalized prostitution, and get home for the next morning's shift.
They were caught with an almost-new '56 Oldsmobile 88, and Haggard was carried off to the local jail. More bad decisions followed, including a robbery, an attempted robbery, and a short-lived escape from the Bakersfield jail on Christmas Day 1957. Consequently, he found himself in the notorious San Quentin prison by the end of February 1958 with a sentence of six months to fifteen years and all privileges revoked, including access to the Martin guitar his mother had bought him when he was 14.
Merle Haggard was finally released on November 3rd, 1960. Back home, he started showing up at local nightspots again and landed steady gigs that enabled him to work six nights a week. At a temporary engagement in the fall of 1962, he was rediscovered by steel guitarist Fuzzy Owen, to whom he had submitted a demo tape years earlier for Owen's local Tally label. The two sides he recorded,
released
in early 1963, caught the ear of Ken Nelson, whose country music division had launched
Buck Owens
at Capitol Records.
After a hit with Wynn Stewart's "Sing A Sad Song" and a less successful follow-up, Haggard signed with Capitol in February 1964. His first Capitol single, songwriter Liz Anderson's "(my friends are gonna be)
Strangers”,
reached Number 10 on the Billboard country chart, and his first album,
Strangers,
emerged in September 1965, earning him a citation from the newly formed Academy of Country Music as Best New Male Vocalist of 1965.
By this time, Haggard had married Buck Owens' first wife, Bonnie Owens, whose debut Capitol
album
garnered her an award for Top Female Vocalist of 1965. "Ken Nelson knew a good thing when he saw it," Eliot
reports,
"and brought Merle and Bonnie back into Capitol Studios to record an album called
which did even better than the one Haggard had just released, vaulting all the way to Number 4 on the Billboard chart.
More top-selling albums followed which included the unforgettable hits
"The Bottle Let Me Down",
"I'm A Lonesome Fugitive",
"Branded Man",
"Sing Me Back Home”,
"Mama Tried",
"Hungry Eyes",
"Workin' Man’s Blues",
"Silver Wings",
"Okie From Fuskogee",
and
There were also tribute albums to his first two childhood heroes,
and
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The early Seventies were a time of significant change for Merle Haggard. For one thing, he found himself increasingly at odds with Ken Nelson at Capitol Records. "He didn't appreciate that Nelson wanted to keep him narrowly focused as country music's resident redneck," Marc Eliot
explains.
"Merle was looking for something deeper and more complex. He didn't want to continue to travel a commercially rich but creatively retrogressive road. Corporate's bottom line, as personified by Nelson, brought out the fightin' side of Merle, never a good place for an opponent to be."
Second, his trusted friend and manager, Fuzzy Owen, was beginning to tire of the long-haul tours and the responsibility of co-ordinating them. "Merle promised to get Fuzzy some relief," Eliot
elaborates,
"and began to look for someone to take over most of his tour duties. As it turned out, that someone found him."
The role was filled by Bob Eubanks, the Los Angeles disc jockey and concert producer best known for hosting the nationally televised daytime show "The Newlywed Game". "He declared he could raise Merle's price to a minimum $10,000 a show and guaranteed at least a hundred bookings a year, which amounted to a million dollars," Eliot
explains.
"If he didn't meet that goal, Eubanks promised, he would voluntarily resign." The goal was met, and the resignation proved unnecessary.
Chronicling the most tumultuous change of all at the time for Haggard, Marc Eliot
writes,
"Nothing got to him or hurt him more than his reckoning with Bonnie. Bonnie—the compliant, indulgent mother figure, and the band's den mother, was always ready to sit and listen to anyone's troubles. Unfortunately, no one wanted to hear hers, especially Merle."
"It finally proved too much for Bonnie," Eliot
continues,
"and eventually she stopped even trying to keep Merle interested in her as anything but a voice singing harmony, or as a handler of some of the more mundane chores of touring. Hair curlers became her most frequent companion."
She had put up with his penchant for womanizing for years, but one incident on a Midwest tour proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. "The boys in the band, most of whom were married, preferred stopping in the middle of the night at one of the many truck stops along the Interstates, where the best high-carb food and cold beer could be found, the waitresses all had big hair and big other things, and the most sought-after hookers were well worked," Eliot explains in his
book.
"One night on the road, at one of the more notorious truck stops, some of the boys had arranged to meet their most favored ladies of the night, and Merle went with them."
The consequences were predictable. In the last of several attempts at reconciliation, Haggard called home from Los Angeles, and Bonnie laid down the law. "She agreed to stay on as a performer, but that was all," Eliot
continues.
"From now on, she was going to sleep on the band's bus and no longer be on call for him when he felt inspired and needed a secretary. Maybe he should hire one of his truck-stop tootsies if she knew how to read and write."
Meanwhile during that troubled year of 1973, Merle Haggard cut one of his most artistically important albums: a concert recorded on the road by Fuzzy Owen and entitled
I Love Dixie Blues
(So I Recorded Live In New Orleans). It was his third concert album, but unlike the Bob Wills
tribute,
the audience was excitingly audible.
"I've always been interested in history, especially when it comes to music," Haggard told his audience by way of introduction, "and I find a great connection between the popular music of today, in all fields, and the music that originated here in New Orleans over half a century ago. Here's a song that I've written, and it's another blues number. I guess a man ain't got no right to sing the blues unless he's had 'em, and I've certainly had the blues one time or another." With that, he launched into one of his most memorable songs of all time, "Everybody's Had The Blues".
It was followed up with the first of several standards from the original jazz age, "Big Bad Bill (is sweet William now). It was written by Twenties jazz pioneer Clarence Williams, but Haggard's source, as he told his listeners, was a 2924 recording by Jimmie Rodgers' early yodeling inspiration,
Emmett Miller.
He introduced the all-time classic "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans" with a poetic homage to the French Quarter, concluding, "As I walk, I listen to all the different beats, And somehow I knew without a doubt that
Jimmie Rodgers
walked these streets." The three-piece Dixieland Express was in its glory for the instrumental rendition that followed, led by dynamic trumpeter John McCormick and featuring solos from clarinetist Gene Bolen and trombonist Dale Hampton.
"Okie From Muskogee" got the enthusiastic response one would expect, and Haggard continued the patriotic theme with a new composition called "I Wonder If Withy Ever Think of Me" that powerfully captured the mood of an America still in the throes of war. "I'm sure that in the past, New Orleans has given dearly in the defense of our country," he emphasized, "and I'm sure that it bears its share of sorrow in wartime. Here's a song that I want to dedicate to all the Servicemen in New Orleans and to all the POW's who have returned and to all those who we pray will return."
As the band struck up "America The Beautiful", Haggard told his audience, "On behalf of the Strangers, Miss Bonnie, The Dixieland Express, and yours truly, Ol' Hag, I hope that we've done something here tonight that's worth recording. I feel we have, and I want to thank you for bein' part of it and helpin' me on it, and we'll see you the next time we're down this way."
Despite the fact that it's been allowed to go out of print, the album was, in this writer's not-so-humble opinion, one of the greatest moments in Merle Haggard's career. It not only made Number 3 on Billboard's country listing, but it even made a showing on the pop chart at number 125.
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(This article will continue in the next issue of Heritage Music Review. Your copy of Marc Eliot's book, THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard, is waiting for you at Phinney Books, 7405 Greenwood Avenue North in Seattle.
Phone: 206/297-2665
Web: www.phinneybooks.com).
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WHAT'S IN STORE: NEWS FROM THE MUSICAL Marketplace
Find The Merle Haggard Story At Phinney Books
"There's the guy I'd love to be and the guy I am," country music legend Merle Haggard once confided to biographer Marc Eliot. "I'm somewhere in between, in deep water, swimming to the other shore." All the complexity of the circumstances and choices that shaped him are revealed with unflinching honesty in Eliot's new book THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard. Your copy is waiting for you at Phinney Books in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Avenue North
Phone: 206/297-2665
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Learn To Write Your Own Songs At Dusty Strings
Dusty Strings Music Store and School in Seattle's Fremont district, long known for its array of fine stringed instruments, instructional workshops, and folk concerts, is hosting a unique online workshop via Zoom taught by Nashville songwriter Tai Shan. On four consecutive Suesdays beginning January 23rd at 7 PM Pacific Time. In these four sessions, the website proclaims, "Tai Shan's Songwriting Intensive will have you scribbling out new lyrics faster than you can write."
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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Vintage Electric Lap Steel At Emerald City Guitars
Emerald City Guitars in Seattle's Pioneer Square, well known for its fascinating selection of new and vintage acoustic and electric guitars, amps, and accessories, has recently acquired an Audiovox 7-string lap steel guitar and amp, made in Seattle, from
1930's.
Emerald City Guitars
83 South Washington Street
Phone: 206/382-0231
Web: www.emeraldcityguitars.com
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On The Newsstand: Heritage Music Review
The print edition of Heritage Music Review is available by subscription for $15 per year and on sale at the following Seattle newsstands and music venues:
FREMONT:
American Music: 4450 Fremont Avenue North
Dusty Strings Acoustic Music Shop: 3406 Fremont Avenue North
UNIVERSITY DISTRICT:
Bulldog News: 4208 University Way Northeast
Greenwood:
Phinney Books: 7405 Greenwood Avenue North
CAPITOL HILL:
Elliott Bay Book Company: 1521 10th Avenue
PIONEER SQUARE:
Emerald City Guitars: 83 South Washington Street
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