Merle Haggard: The Original Outlaw (a profile)

I wrote this 7700-word profile of Merle Haggard in 2006-07 for Time-Life Records, and it became the liner notes for the label's 3-disc set of Haggard tunes, part of its Legends of American Music series. The set was released November 06, 2007, as "Merle Haggard: The Original Outlaw." It's a great set. Buy it.

By Robert Price

The court transcript reveals only spoken words, not stage directions, but the scene is easy to imagine: Bakersfield defense attorney Ralph McKnight has asked the judge to grant his client probation and spare him a prison sentence. But he can offer little to recommend that sort of judicial benevolence beyond the unwavering maternal love of one woman, seated behind him in the gallery. “This mother has tried very hard,” McKnight says, nodding toward her deferentially. The Honorable Norman F. Main looks down at the lengthy rap sheet, glances across the courtroom at anxious Flossie Haggard and then studies the defendant. “If he had tried half as hard as his mother did ....” And down deep, 20-year-old Merle Haggard knows that the judge speaks the simple, undeniable truth.

Merle Haggard apologized to his mother in song, with “Mama Tried,” which reached No. 1 in 1968. But in the half-century since that courtroom scene, Haggard’s music has more often celebrated the Sons and Daughters Who Tried — the hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck, rent-to-own people who drove the trucks, picked the cotton, punched the time clocks and, yes, sometimes committed the crimes, both petty and grievous, as they struggled against a system that seemed weighted against them. Not just the working class but the tier below as well -- the hungry class. Haggard has sung about back doors, swingin’ doors and cell doors, but he has never strayed far from the defining themes of his life’s work: blue-collar pride and personal dignity. Basic Okieness.

Haggard has always expressed all those things with a graceful, lilting baritone and a poetic genius that belies his well-deserved reputation as a wild, hard-partying rebel. His harrowing Huck Finn-meets-Harry Houdini youth, hopping freight trains, singing for beer, stealing cars, surviving automobile wrecks, botching burglaries and escaping from jails, was more than ample fodder for the story lines that comprise his prolific body of work. Punk, prodigy, potato packer, ditch digger, cotton picker, convict, patriot, iconoclast – Haggard has been all those things and more.

Haggard never lived in Oklahoma, but he lived in and embodied Oildale, an unincorporated, working class town just across the Kern River from Bakersfield. Oildale might as well be part of the Sooner state: It differs from poorer rural corners of Oklahoma only in terms of climate and longitude. Migrants from the Southern Plains had been bringing their plain-spoken ways to California a decade before the first Dust Bowl storms of the mid-1930s. The Haggards were one such family.
James Haggard was a hard-working man and a devoted husband. He had played the fiddle in local honky-tonk bars as a young man, but his wife Flossie, a faithful member of the Church of Christ, insisted he stop when they married in 19xx. But music never left their lives. They sang quartet music from the popular Stamps-Brumley songbooks and gathered around the family radio most evenings to listen to the eclectic collection of stars that came into their home.

In the late 1920s and early ‘30s, the Haggards and their two small children, Lillian and Lowell, moved from city to city, a new crisis attending their every move. James suffered serious burns to his hands in an industrial accident in Pennsylvania in 1929, and while he rehabilitated in Chicago, Flossie’s health deteriorated. James’ physician recommended they move to California for her sake, and as soon as James was well enough, they did – moving in with the family of Flossie’s sister’s family in rural Arvin, just in time for the stock market crash. But it was the valley’s searing heat, not economics, that proved most daunting, and after two months James took his family east again – this time to Checotah, Oklahoma, to try his hand at farming. Their leased farm was sold out from under them, but they quickly found a second farm and prospered well enough to afford a 1931 Ford Model A and – glory of glories – a dog.

But things changed one night in early 1934. A heavy rain was pouring when a man knocked at the door. His wife was sick, he said, and he needed to get her to the doctor. Could he borrow the family’s Ford? James said the Ford would never make it across the muddy dirt roads, but he’d take the man and his wife in the horse and wagon. The man refused the offer and left. Three months the Haggards awoke to find their barn in flames – an arson fire, the family always suspected, payback for refusing the use of their car the night of that torrential downpour. “The animals all got out, but the car didn’t,” Lillian remembers. The fire burned all of their feed and seed grains too. Discouraged, James and Flossie quit the farm and moved into town, where James and another man opened a two-pump Mobil gas station. Within a few months James was felled by appendicitis. Downhearted again, James felt California beckoning one more time. Flossie agreed, and, fortified by a $40 loan from her sister and the promise of some farm work, they set out on July 15, 1935, with all their possessions in a homemade trailer towed by a battered 1926 Chevy.

Merle Ronald Haggard was born almost two years later. By then, James Haggard had landed a $40-per-week job as a carpenter with the Santa Fe Railroad, allowing him to support his family better than most Depression-era fathers. He had also acquired a refrigerated box car, situated it on a lot 100 yards south of a heavily used main track line and fashioned it into a sturdy, 1200-square foot home.

Merle demonstrated a love for music almost from the start. He recalls pointing to the radio and asking for “stewed ham” – toddler talk, his mother eventually realized, for country singer Stuart Hamblen, whose 4 p.m. broadcast out of Los Angeles was a family favorite.

One night in June 1946, 9-year-old Merle came home from a Wednesday night prayer meeting to find his father paralyzed from a stroke. James Haggard died the next day. Flossie Haggard was forced to take a $35-a-week job as a bookkeeper for a meat-packing company, and suddenly it was just mother and son, older siblings Lowell and Lillian having already set out on their own. Merle blamed himself for his father’s death. “That was just what his 9-year-old mind believed,” said Lillian, who was 25 at the time. “He couldn’t figure out why his father had died.” At 8, Merle had been ill for months with valley fever – coccidioidomycosis, a potentially deadly soil-borne fungus that doctors in those days treated like tuberculosis. The family doctor had ordered him to remain in bed, a directive that made sense for TB but not little-understood valley fever, and within a few weeks Merle was climbing the walls. Then, not long after Merle was medically cleared, to the relief of all, his father died. “He somehow connected the two things,” Lillian said. “This was before we had the sort of psychiatry that might have helped a boy with that sort of burden.” When Merle wasn’t being shuttled from one relative to another, he was alone, restless. He hopped his first freight at 11 and was returned home by the police, but he continued to cut classes and ride the rails. Brother Lowell struck upon a useful distraction: He gave Merle, now 12, his first guitar, a used Sears and Roebuck model somebody had left as payment at the gas station where Lowell worked, and boy taught himself how to play by listening to records.

By now Merle was a huge fan of Bob Wills, the western swing bandleader whose Texas Playboys had created an addictive hybrid of big-band swing, cowboy ballads and distilled jazz and blues. Merle’s passion for music increased manifestly in October 1950 when Lefty Frizzell seized the airwaves with “I Love You a Thousand Ways.” “Oh, God, he was unbelievable," Haggard said later of Frizzell. “He was different. He had his own tone. … He had done this little stint in jail, so he knew more about being away than a lot of people did. He was really good at writing about separation -- that was his main subject matter -- and he wrote about it with sincerity and (in) the only vocabulary he knew.” Merle, still an adolescent, learned to imitate Frizzell’s vocal style, and he worked at developing the performer’s unique guitar “curls.”

By this time, Merle was attending Standard School in Oildale, and he was a few weeks from graduation from the eighth grade. One morning the school’s chorus teacher was late for class. Merle, full of mischief, called the class to order, and, with a grand sweep of his arms, began directing them through one of their songs, mimicking the teacher’s distinctive style. The teacher, of course, walked in on this raucous scene. Such a display might have drawn a laugh from a good-natured teacher, or detention from an ill-natured teacher, but this teacher recommended expulsion. The principal agreed. Merle was forced to move in with his aunt in Lamont and finish at Mountain View School.

The bitter taste of injustice was still in his mouth when he started at Bakersfield High School the next fall. His head was even more full of music by this time, and he neglected to attend many of his classes that first week. “He couldn’t focus on school,” said his sister Lillian, who had landed a job as the school registrar. “He kept cutting class. He had a pass for the railroad because our dad had worked for the Santa Fe, but he preferred hopping freights because it was more fun.” Merle’s counselor, Fred Robinson, could see what was happening too, and the two of them were determined to step in before things got out of hand. “Fred came over and said, ‘What do you think about having him hauled off to spend the weekend in juvvy?,” Lillian recalls him saying. “’Think that might straighten him up?’ I agreed it might, and that’s what we did. But Merle didn’t think it was fair – the punishment didn’t fit the crime. So he got out of there the first day, just walked out. And that was the start of it.” Lillian felt so bad about it, she didn’t get around to telling her brother about her role in his first incarceration for years. “I felt guilty for having said yes to this. He was never really an evil person. He was just a troubled kid.”

Merle was incorrigible from that point. He’d take any job he could find -- pitching hay, sacking up potatoes, roughnecking in the oil fields – then run away, come home when he felt like it (or get hauled back), then run away again. Flossie, desperate to straighten her son out, put him in one juvenile detention center after another, but few could hold him. At 14, he and his friend Bob Teague ran away to Texas, where Merle accomplished two noteworthy goals. He purchased his first pair of cowboy boots in a secondhand store and he was relieved of his virginity in an Amarillo whorehouse. “I think the cowboy boots affected me more,” Merle said years later. “I mean, the gal just affirmed what I already knew, but the cowboy boots made a new man out of me.”

They set out for California four months later but were arrested as robbery suspects before they could get out of Texas. This was a rare instance where Merle was innocent of the charges, but even after the actual thieves were apprehended and the boys got home, Merle paid for his truancy with a stint in juvenile hall. He skipped out again, however, and he and Teague took off for Modesto, 200 miles to the north. Merle did manual labor, worked as a short-order cook, drove a truck, and committed a burglary here and there. The highlight of their brief stay in Modesto was Merle’s first job as a performer: He and Teague were hired at a bar named the Fun Center, where they exclusively played Lefty Frizzell and Jimmie Rodgers songs – the only tunes they knew at the time. They were paid five dollars a night, plus all the beer they could drink.

Arrested again for truancy when he got home, Merle was sent to Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier. He ran away, was rearrested, sent to the high-security Preston School of Industry; was released after 15 months, then was arrested yet again for helping a kid he’d met at PSI beat up a slow-witted, harmless boy in an attempted robbery, an act for which Merle would always feel ashamed. But it was back to PSI. When he got home Merle was somewhat more inclined to behave – not that it would last.
In late 1953, he and Teague bought tickets to see Lefty Frizzell perform at the all-ages Rainbow Gardens dance hall. Haggard was in awe. “He was dressed in white -- heroes usually are,” Merle said later. Before the show he caught sight of Roy Nichols, the teen guitar phenom who played guitar in Frizzell’s band, and he called out to him, asking how it was working for a star. “Not worth a shit,” answered Nichols, who was about to quit and take a job with the Maddox Brothers and Rose. Some of Merle’s friends were able to go backstage to meet Frizzell, and they told the singer they had a friend who played and sang just like him. Frizzell told them to bring him back, so they fetched Merle, who summoned the nerve to sing a couple songs for his idol. Frizzell was so impressed he refused to take the stage until Merle went first, backed by Frizzell’s own band. He played two or three songs, and the audience – by chance, young Bonnie Owens among them -- loved him. Teague is convinced some in the audience initially thought Merle WAS Lefty.

Haggard’s career as a working-class hoodlum troubadour continued until, at 16, he took off with a local girl and set up housekeeping in Eugene, Ore. It lasted three months, and when it ended, he hopped a freight and came back to Bakersfield. At 17 he married a waitress, Leona Hobbs, and they had a child almost immediately, Merle supporting the family with manual labor and the occasional petty crime. At age 18 he moved up to car theft, drawing 19 months in the Ventura County jail, followed by a 90-day sentence for pillaging a scrap-metal yard. Through it all, Merle continued to perform, lying about his age so he could sneak into places like the Blackboard, the Clover Club and the Lucky Spot, and occasionally sitting in. He put in a guest appearance on KBAK-TV’s “Chuck Wagon Gang,” starring Billy Mize and Cliff Crofford, and afterward Mize took him aside and told him he’d go far if he tried.

"He might have gotten there a lot sooner if he’d tried half as hard as his mother did trying to raise him. But as Merle said later, “My criminal way of life was taking over.” In late 1957, just before Christmas, Merle and a couple of hooligan friends got drunk on cheap wine and decided to compensate for the shortage of good, available jobs by pulling a heist. Leona, unaware of their plans, bundled up the baby and accompanied them to Fred & Gene’s Café, a small restaurant co-owned by a friend’s cousin. The drunken trio, believing it was 3 o’clock in the morning, tried to pry open the back door of the restaurant. They were only off by four and half hours -- the café was still open and serving customers. The owner came around back to investigate the noise and the group fled. Merle was arrested the next day, but he escaped from the county jail by simply walking out with a group of other arrestees headed for court. He was picked up a few hours later while he was having a Christmas Eve cocktail at his brother Lowell’s house. The deputy allowed him to finish his drink before hauling him off. Judge Main allowed Merle no such favors, however. Haggard was sentenced to a 15-year term and sent to San Quentin prison.

Haggard had always seen himself a rising star. So had most of the people who’d had the pleasure of hearing him sing. San Quentin, his home as of March 26, 1958, saw him differently – as California A-45200. Haggard was not a model prisoner, at least not at first. He steamed up some home brew right under the guards’ noses, got caught and was sent to solitary. He not only turned 21 in prison, he spent his birthday alone in a 9-by-12 cell with only a pair of "pajama bottoms, a Bible (which doubled as a pillow), a blanket and a cement floor. He stayed seven life-changing days, separated from death row by only a vented plumbing alley. Among his neighbors was convicted killer Caryl Chessman, with whom Haggard conversed on and off through the thick walls.

Haggard emerged a changed man. He asked for a tougher job in the prison textile mill, studied for his high school equivalency degree and was allowed to join the prison band. When he made his second appearance before the parole board – he’d been denied the first time around – his sentence was modified to five years, the last two years and three months of it on parole. That meant he had just 90 days left to go in the prison. He wept when he read those words. “Going to prison has one of a few effects,” Haggard said years later. “It can make you worse, or it can make you understand and appreciate freedom. I learned to appreciate freedom when I didn’t have any.” On Nov. 3, 1960, at the conclusion of the longest three months of his life, prison officials gave Haggard $15 and a bus ticket home. He’d spent seven of his first 23 years locked up.

Haggard came home to a wife and two children – the younger one having been conceived by another man while Haggard was in prison. Haggard got a job digging ditches for his brother Lowell’s electrical company while he tried to line up a job in a club, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain where he’d been for almost three years. Soon enough, he landed a fill-in job at the Lucky Spot, playing with fiddler Jelly Sanders and others on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, when Johnny Barnett’s house band was off. It was there that he met Charles “Fuzzy” Owen and Lewis Talley, cousins from Arkansas who worked at the Lucky Spot as fill-in musicians themselves and fancied themselves recording executives-in-training. Haggard had a tendency to forget the words to the songs, and Owen would razz him mercilessly about it. They became friends. “Merle was really nervous when I first heard him sing,” Owen said. “He was paranoid, just got out of the joint. But he was good. Even his mistakes sounded good. I thought, ‘Hey, I better listen to this guy a little bit.’ Turned out he could do ‘em all, rock ‘n’ roll and everything. Still can.” One day Bill Rea, who was married to Haggard’s sister Lillian, took it upon himself to try and advance Merle’s career by calling the producer of Cousin Herb’s “Trading Post,” a five-day-a-week Bakersfield TV show that featured many of the stars of Bakersfield’s growing constellation of country-music entertainers. “I’ve got a brother-in-law who sings,” he told Al Brumley, who performed on the show himself and managed its guest stars. Brumley agreed to audition him. Haggard walked into Brumley’s office the next day, picked up the Martin guitar he kept in a corner and had Brumley almost from the first note. Haggard was added to the show’s lineup two nights a week. Favorable fan mail started pouring in, and soon Haggard was performing five nights a week on the “Trading Post.”

In 1962, Owen convinced Haggard to record for Tally Records, the small label he and Talley had been trying to make money at since ‘55. Haggard went into the little studio they’d put together in an old Quonset hut and, using a borrowed tape machine and a rinky-dink, three-channel amplifier that barely qualified as a mixing board, recorded two songs: a Haggard composition, “Skid Row,” and Fuzzy’s own tune, “Singing My Heart Out.” They traveled to Phoenix to polish up the tapes and pressed 200 copies or so to distribute to radio stations. The songs didn’t do much, but they did enough to get the attention of Capitol Records’ Ken Nelson. That had been the idea all along. “When I put out records with Merle, it was with the intention of selling to a major label,” said Owen, who had become Haggard’s manager. “The idea was to build him up so he’d be worth something.” While Capitol was deciding what to do about Haggard, and none too quickly, he was getting restless. So when Haggard’s old pal Dean Holloway showed up one day, Haggard was easily talked into a quick trip to Las Vegas. They decided to stop in at the Nashville Nevada Club, where country star Wynn Stewart was part-owner and full-time headliner – and Roy Nichols was playing lead guitar. Stewart was out of town, having gone to Nashville to shop for a bass player to replace the departing Bobby Austin, and Nichols invited Haggard up on stage to sing a few. Who should walk in, mid-set, but Stewart. If Haggard was willing to learn to play the bass, Stewart told him later, he had himself a job, and for more money than he’d ever seen in his life -- $225 a week. For six months, from late 1962 until early 1963, Haggard played bass and sang in the band. But Haggard and Las Vegas were not cut out for each other. Haggard gambled away more money than he earned, and he went home to Bakersfield with his tail between his legs – though not before convincing Stewart to give him permission to record one of his songs – “Sing A Sad Song.” He recorded the song in 1963 and it came out on the Tally label in early 1964, climbing to number 19 on the country charts. Haggard had the hit he’d been hoping to find.

That year Haggard started putting together this own band. He had Fuzzy and Lewis, of course, and he brought in Fuzzy’s girlfriend Bonnie Owens, a regular on Cousin Herb’s “Trading Post” who’d been married years before to Buck Owens, a longtime club and session guitarist who by now was on the cusp of superstardom. Bonnie was a songwriter in her own right who’d been making ends meet for years slinging screwdrivers and Schlitz beer on the side at the Blackboard and the Clover Club. She was known for jumping on stage and singing when things got slow and for scribbling song-lyrics fragments onto cocktail napkins when the inspiration hit, which was sometimes right in the middle of a drink order.

In mid-1964, the newly formed band was playing an engagement at a club in Orangevale, just northeast of Sacramento, when an acquaintance of Bonnie’s, songwriter Liz Anderson, came in with her husband and their teenage daughter. They invited Merle and the band over to their house after the show for breakfast, hoping Merle would take an interest in some of the songs she’d written. Haggard was less than thrilled, but he agreed to go anyway.

“They dragged me to her house at 4 a.m.,” Haggard said years later. “I didn’t want to listen to her songs; I just knew they weren’t any good. I’m sitting over there eating bacon and eggs on a footstool, she’s at a pump organ -- a little bitty girl -- and she starts singing these great (sounding) songs, like ‘All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers’ and ‘Just Between the Two of Us.’ I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘I'll record all of those. I think ‘Strangers’ is a hit, and if ‘Just Between the Two of Us’ isn’t a hit, I’ll kiss everybody’s ass in Sacramento.’”

He didn’t have to kiss any asses over “Just Between the Two of Us” and he was right about “Strangers” too – in fact he liked it so well, he named his band after the song. "Just Between the Two of Us,” Haggard’s duet with Bonnie, was their first and only big hit together, spending 26 weeks on the charts before it was overtaken by “Strangers,” which proved to be Haggard’s breakthrough song. “We’d sent records to disc jockeys all over the country, and we’d include hand-written notes in each one,” Bonnie said years later. “I was in touch with every disc jockey in the country. When we started doing it, we’d put Merle’s record in with mine. It wasn’t long until I was putting my record in with Merle’s.” By January 1965, Merle Haggard and the Strangers had hit the top ten with “All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers.” The two songs won over Ken Nelson, the A&R man for Capitol Records, and in April 1965, with Fuzzy’s blessing and encouragement, Haggard signed with the label.

Nelson had been trying for a year and half to sign Haggard. The singer had first grabbed Nelson’s attention on Sept. 12, 1963, at concert at Bakersfield Civic Auditorium honoring the 10-year anniversary of Cousin Herb Henson’s “Trading Post” TV show. The show, which featured Glen Campbell, Joe Maphis, Johnny Bond, Owens and many others, was recorded live for Capitol as “Country Music Hootenanny.” Haggard played guitar and sang backing vocals for Henson (who would die of a heart attack two months later). “After we were done, I walked up to Merle and asked him if he’d like to sign with Capitol,” Nelson said. “He just said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, wh-wh-why?’ He said he had a contract with Tally Records. That was this little label he had with Fuzzy Owen. I’d never even heard of it at the time, but over the next few months I started to see it on the chart.”

Nelson was a hands-off producer. He demanded that his artists be practiced, prepared and professional, but otherwise he let them be. Nashville producers might make demands about specific material, instruments or musicians, but Nelson was much less likely to try to call those shots. In that way, by preserving the musical fingerprints of his West Coast artists, he consigned to history a unique sound. He’d jump in if he didn’t like something. “But if it was good, Ken would say, ‘A joy to hear and a sight to behold,’” Bonnie said. “If he said that, we all knew it was good. But he never tried to tell Merle how to sing. They made a good team.”

The hits started to come, starting with Haggard’s own composition, “Swingin’ Doors.” Haggard had an inkling he had a hit on his hands because weeks before he even went into the studio, Buck Owens had called wanting to know if he could record it instead. If anyone knew how to spot a hit, Haggard reasoned, it was Buck, who’d suddenly developed the Midas touch. Therefore “Swingin’ Doors” must be gold. They were both right.

The success of Ken Nelson’s approach as a producer was underscored in April 1966, when Nelson was unavailable and Haggard was ready to record a follow-up to “Swingin’ Doors.” Haggard and the Strangers went to Nashville and got themselves another producer. The results were abominable and the tapes were buried. Haggard -- back in Hollywood, with Nelson and co-producer Fuzzy Owen in the booth -- cut “The Bottle Let Me Down” with honky-tonk guitarists Glen Campbell and James Burton (later to bring his searing lead guitar to Elvis Presley’s band) playing alongside Roy Nichols.

Haggard’s marriage to Leona Hobbs had crumbled the year before and the children – now there were four -- were living with Merle’s mother. Bonnie, who’d been having some trouble getting along with Fuzzy, had been touring Alaska at the time, and Haggard realized he missed her. He flew to Seattle and called her: Could he visit, and maybe look for some club work? Bonnie was wary about it, but she said OK. Two weeks later, on June 28, 1965, they were married in Tijuana.

By this time, Bakersfield had become something of a country-music Mecca. It had had a renowned club scene for more than a decade, but Buck Owens had lifted the farming-and-oil town to another level. The Bakersfield Sound had a distinct quality, easily differentiated the Nashville Sound of the time. To Bakersfield ears, Nashville’s music often tended to sound the same. Nashville record producers of that era - people like Don Law of Columbia Records, Steve Sholes of RCA and Owen Bradley of Decca - had been heavily influenced by the Big Band sound of the previous decade, and in some cases they had helped mold that sound themselves. It had developed a warm, rich sound often textured with soft horns, soothing strings and lush backing vocals. Bakersfield country, by comparison, had grown out of hardcore, electrified honky tonk, with elements of western swing and rockabilly. “I had a big old Fender Telecaster guitar, the walls of the buildings were hard, the dance floor was cement, the roof was sheet metal,” Buck Owens explained in 1997. “There was considerable echo in there. ... It was just the sound that people wanted.”

And somehow, Owens managed to get the cement-floor sound into his recordings. Part of it was studio technique: Owens seemed to reproduce better on monophonic AM radio than many country contemporaries because, in the studio, he turned up the treble and cut back on the bass. It was a perfect formula for the single-speaker car radios in all those Ford Fairlanes and Dodge Darts. Haggard’s music, especially in those early years, had many of the same qualities. Haggard had met Owens back in 1961, and he’d even briefly played bass for his band – Haggard’s most lasting contribution was suggesting the Buckaroos as a name – but he was probably more strongly influenced by Tommy Collins and Wynn Stewart. Haggard admired Stewart’s style on stage, particularly in his phrasing, and he admired Collins in the songwriting department.


But Haggard, who had always been his own man, was developing a songwriting style all his own. “It’s amazing to me the things that come out of Merle’s mouth when he’s writing,” Bonnie said years later. “I never heard him talk like that. He’d say later, ‘Bonnie, I don’t ever remember saying those words. It’s like God put them through me.’ I knew he said them. I was there. I’d write them down. ‘Today I Started Loving You Again’ was one of them. ‘If We Make It Through December’ was another. I’d say ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, read it to me.’ I would. Then he’d say, ‘I did not remember saying that line.’ He was just amazed.” His gift was never more evident than one night in Dallas in 1967. It was 2 a.m., and Haggard was hungry. He asked Bonnie to go down the street and get him a hamburger. When she got back to their motel room just a few minutes later, he’d scribbled the words to “Today I Started Loving You Again” on a brown paper bag. He sang it to her as she cried. (Dawidoff, 257)

Haggard’s music always had more a jazz sensibility to it, though, most likely owing to his devotion to Bob Wills and western swing. Roy Nichols’ jazz inflections, largely attributable to his primary musical inspiration, French-gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, were also a vital element. Not surprisingly, Haggard developed an appreciation for musicians that was more reminiscent of a jazz bandleader than a country-music front man. His early bands had few equals: He had Roy Nichols and James Burton on lead guitar Glen Campbell on rhythm guitar and harmony vocals, Ralph Mooney on steel and Glen Hardin on piano. Haggard himself developed a clear-toned, twang-free delivery rich with tenderness that struck listeners as sensitive and sincere, even as some of his lyrical themes addressed earthy topics. Haggard embraced the notion that he had fused two musical genres, and in fact has long referred to his music as “country jazz.” “I realized that jazz meant that you could play anything,” said Haggard, the only country musician to have appeared on the cover of Down Beat, the jazz-music bible. “It meant that you were a full-fledged musician, that you could play with Louis Armstrong or Johnny Cash.”

=The hits were coming regularly now. Haggard was voted the Top Male Vocalist by the Academy of Country Music Awards, and he and Bonnie were named the Top Vocal Group for the second year in a row. Haggard had put aside his concerns about his criminal past, taking Johnny Cash’s advice and to address his problems openly in song. “I was bull-headed about my career. I didn’t want to talk about being in prison,” Haggard said. “but Cash said I should talk about it. That way the tabloids wouldn’t be able to. I said I didn’t want to do that and he said, ‘It’s just owning up to it.’” Haggard, who’d admired Cash since he’d seen him perform at San Quentin years before, couldn’t argue with that. Cash introduced Haggard on his variety show as “a man who writes about his own life and has had a life to write about,” and Haggard was forever free. Prison- and crime-themed songs became a trademark, with “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” “Branded Man” and “The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde” all reaching the top of the charts. Haggard also demonstrated a soft side with “You Don’t Have Very Far to Go” (co-written by Bakersfield’s Red Simpson, who became a second-tier star himself with a series of truck-driving-themed recordings), “Today I Started Loving You Again,” “You Still Have a Place In My Heart,” “I Just Want To Look At You One More Time” and “I Threw Away the Rose.”

Haggard’s music took a political turn in 1969 with “Okie From Muskogee,” regaled as the anthem of the silent majority in the difficult days of mounting casualties in Vietnam, anti-war demonstrations and counter-culture hippies. Of course Haggard had been covertly political for most of his career, so covert perhaps Haggard did not fully realize it himself. “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” “Hungry Eyes” and “Workin’ Man Blues,” among others, had already firmly positioned Haggard as a man with working-class, anti-elite, populist sentiments. “Okie From Muskogee” both reinforced and contradicted that stance.

Sociologists and assorted pundits have long debated the song’s meaning and intent, and Haggard has more than occasionally joined in the fray. Was it a parody or a sincerely indignant jab at the pot smoking left? Its origins suggest the former. Haggard’s tour bus was heading east through Oklahoma in mid-1969 when he and his bandmates spotted a road sign: “Muskogee 19 miles.” (Escott p. 129). A band member joked that they probably didn’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, and twenty minutes later Merle had written the song. But Haggard didn’t know what he’d created until he played it publicly for the first time on that same road swing. It was at a small club for noncommissioned Army officers in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the crowd had seemed exceptionally disinterested all night. Then the Strangers launched into “Okie” and people sat uprights in their seats. As the song progressed, the audience got increasingly agitated. Haggard, then 32, initially feared he’d incited the crowd to anger. “The whole place went berserk,” Haggard recalled, remembered how he stiffened as soldiers poured into the aisles.

Perhaps they’d interpreted the song as hostile to the military, or a slap at the conservative middle America. But Haggard quickly realized the soldiers were rushing the stage merely to shake his hand and pat his back.

At the following night’s show, playing before enlisted men, it was more of the same. “They started comin’ after me on the stage,” Haggard said, “and I didn’t know what was going to happen next until they said we’d have to do it again before they’d let us go.” The song, recorded in Hollywood on July 17, 1969, made Haggard the hottest commodity in country music, and a tough ticket at venues across the country. When Haggard performed the song at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles a few month after its release, the audience kept time with thunderous rhythmic claps. “Almost every phrase of ‘Okie from Muskogee’ brought applause from the crowd,” the reviewer from the weekly California Country fan magazine reported. The Atlantic Monthly described a similar scene on Dayton, Ohio. “…Suddenly they are on their feet, berserk, waving flags and stomping and whistling and cheering … and for those brief moments the majority isn’t silent anymore.” As a single, the song sold 264,000 copies the first year, and as an album (“Okie” was the title track) it surpassed 885,000 – making one of the few country albums of the period to achieve gold-record status. It propelled Haggard to the Country Music Association’s 1970 entertainer of the year award.

Meanwhile, some critics decried its ultraconservatism; others tried to rehabilitate the song by reading it as a populist, working-class assault on middle-class snobbery and elitism. Still others were convinced Haggard has recorded it as a straight-faced parody. Haggard has given credence to all those interpretations, possibly because he honestly believed each explanation various times, possibly because he likes to yank people’s chains. Then there was the explanation most country-music fans subscribed to: Haggard wrote it and sang it because he believed. For Haggard, a man of many contradictions, that was no doubt true as well, despite the famous declaration he made to an interviewer in 1974: “Son, the only place I don’t smoke is in Muskogee.”
“Okie from Musokee” became perhaps the most parodied songs on the Vietnam era, inspiring left-of-center knockoffs by Kinky Friedman, Commander Cody and Arlo Guthrie. So many country, rock, and country-rock groups released transmogrified versions of “Okie” that a writer from Rolling Stone magazine decided to keep score. The song had been recorded 20 times as of March 1971. The tally then: “Honkies, 12, Hippies. 8.”

It the context of Haggard’s lifelong body of work, it becomes clear that when Haggard saw protesting college students, he didn’t just see disrespect for flag and country, he saw class distinction and privilege.

These were coddled rich kids who’d never been hungry a day in their lives. In the minds of people like Haggard who considered themselves working-class patriots, these were trust-fund snot-noses who’d never stooped over a row of cotton in their lives, never seen dirt under their own fingernails. The marijuana was one thing – and maybe not such a big thing at that -- but the naïvete’ and presumptuousness were quite another. If the literal weight of the lyrics was an indication, the song was less about Vietnam than about class dignity and worth – “I’m proud to be an Okie” is the song’s most repeated line, and in fact it spawned an infestation of “Okie pride” bumper stickers, belt buckles and trucker’s caps. Eventually Haggard began expressing misgivings about the song’s tendency to brand him a reactionary. “Boy, I tell, you, I didn’t realize how strong some people felt about those things,” he said in 1971. (Paul Hemphill, 99) The song “made me appear to be a person who was a lot more narrow-minded, possibly, than I really am,” he said in 1981. (Bob Allen, 76)

There’s no denying it was a gold mine, however, and Capitol seized upon the momentum by pushing back the single Haggard had intended to release next and substituting “Fightin’ Side of Me” – a pugilistic sequel of sorts. From a business point of view, it was the right call, and “Fightin’” followed “Okie” right to the top of the country charts. The George Wallace campaign asked Haggard to endorse him in his bid for reelection as governor of Alabama – Ernest Tubb had already signed on -- but Haggard refused. But Haggard – a regular guest star on television variety shows hosted by Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Barbara Mandrell and others -- had become the darling of the American Right, a fact made even more evident when in 1970 California Gov. Ronald Reagan granted Haggard a full and unconditional pardon for past crimes, and Richard Nixon invited him to the White House in 1973 to sing at wife Pat’s staid birthday party.

In 1973, Haggard’s hit streak having continued unabated, he released his biggest hit, “If We Make It Through December.” Again, he’d drawn on real-life drama for inspiration. Haggard had asked Roy Nichols one day how things were going with his wife, with whom Nichols had been having troubles. “Well, we might be OK if we make it through December,” Nichols replied. Haggard took that poignant line and grafted onto the uncertain economic days of that difficult autumn, telling the story of a working man who’d lost his job and was thinking about his family at Christmas. The song sold 468,000 copies in six months, becoming the biggest hit of Haggard’s career -- and the first to cross over to the pop charts, where it peaked at number 28.

By that Christmas had turned pessimistic and bitter about Richard Nixon because of Watergate and the many economic troubles he’d seen across the country. Gas was getting tough to buy, families were struggling and automobile manufacturers were laying off workers.

At about that time, Haggard built a $700,000 mansion along his beloved Kern River. The place was surrounded by 180 acres of grassland in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains just east of Bakersfield. Among his many toys was a $50,000 model railroad that ran through the living room, across the sun deck and then out onto a trestle above the rear patio. Haggard threw parties and held recording sessions, including one for Bob Wills’ reassembled Texas Playboys. Haggard mastered the fiddle over an intensive six months especially for the occasion. Wills died a few months later, willing Haggard one of his prized fiddles – and an old cigar butt Haggard still keeps under glass.

Haggard stayed with Capitol Records until 1977, when he moved to MCA Records. His first two singles for the record label, “If We’re Not Back in Love by Monday,” and “Ramblin' Fever,” made it to number two, as did two later hits, “I'm Always on a Mountain When I Fall” and “It’s Been a Great Afternoon.” He dabbled in acting, appearing in from the Clint Eastwood film “Bronco Billy” -- with two songs from the songtrack charting. In 1981, Haggard published his autobiography, “Sing Me Back Home” and he left MCA for Epic Records. He began producing his own records, and his first two singles, “My Favorite Memory” and “Big City” went to number one. His duet with George Jones, “Yesterday’s Wine” was also number one, as was his 1983 duet with Willie Nelson, “Pancho and Lefty.” He scored another number one hit in 1987, at the age of 50, with “Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star.” Amid it all, Haggard endured significant financial problems, including trouble with the IRS, a problem he chalked up to having given too many people too much access to too much of his money while he concentrated on his music. “I had earned maybe a hundred million dollars in twenty-five years,” he wrote in “House of Memories,” his second autobiography. “By 1990, I was practically broke.”

That year he changed to Curb Records, a move he eventually regarded as among the bleakest periods of his career. “There is nothing more frustrating than to be a recording artist who isn’t recording or who, if he is, isn’t getting his recordings released,” he wrote in “My House of Memories,” his second autobiography. “The DJs in the world lost track of me because there was nothing new to play. Patty Hearst could’ve been on Curb. For that matter, Amelia Earhart may be there now.” When his contract ran out, Haggard happily skipped over to Anti, a subsidiary of the Epitaph punk-pop label.

By that time Haggard had long since sold his Kern River Canyon mansion and moved to the Lake Shasta area of Northern California. He shares the 200-acre spread, which he calls Shade Tree Manor, with his fifth wife, Theresa Lane, whom he wed in 1993, and their two children. “People who haven’t been around me in years wouldn’t know me,” he wrote. Shade Tree Manor has a veritable petting zoo for the kids and first-rate recording studio, adorned with assorted memorabilia: some of Lewis Talley’s dusty, half-empty bottles of bourbon (Talley died in 1985); one of Bob Wills’ old cigar butts, tenderly preserved in a glass case; and printed words of inspiration, courtesy of Roger Miller: “We Shall Over Dub.”

He continues to record, grousing occasionally about country music’s cookie-cutter hat acts and particularly about the lack of respect the industry accords its elder statesmen. “It’s a damn American shame that they don’t respect Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and George Jones on their own country music stations,” he said in 1995. (Details magazine) “If we were in rock ‘n’ roll, they’d be playing us. Eric Clapton and I are about the same age (and) they’re playing him on rock ‘n’ roll stations. They should play what’s happening today along with what’s happening from the older artists. In order to be played nowadays, you have to be singing about air. It’s got to have that god damn line-dance tempo to it, and you’ve got to be under 40.”

He has no intention of retiring. “I’ve thought about it,” he said in a 2003 interview. “In fact I’ve even tried a little of it. It’s not good for you. You lose what you don’t use. I intend to stay active as long as possible. It’s wonderful to be able to still play and have people coming who will buy the ticket and come to watch you. … It’s a wonderful time in my life. Thank God for all the fans making it that way.”

It’s been a ride. Between 1966 and1987, Haggard and his band recorded 38 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country charts and another 33 that reached the top 10. By the time “If We Make It to December” hit number one Haggard sold more than 8 million albums and 3.5 million singles worth $44.5 million, and he was commanding $15,000 a concert. His songs have been recorded by artists as diverse as the Grateful Dead and Elvis Costello, and one song alone, “Today I Started Loving You Again,” has been recorded by more than 400 performers. Haggard had risen from working as a $40-a-week sideman guitarist to one of the biggest stars in the country-music universe.
Smoke and flash didn’t put him there. He’s never been the type for rhinestones or hand-tooled boots. Neither was it simply the pretty melodies, although that contributed mightily. “He’ll tell you he’s a country singer, but to me the essence of rock and roll is a cry for freedom and rebellion,” producer Don Was, who has worked with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt, told Newsweek in 1996. “And I don’t know anyone who embodies it better. Every aspect of his life is a refusal to submit.”

Maybe that’s why rock and folk-rock audiences were so responsive on concert tours that paired Haggard with the Rolling Stones in 2005 and with Bob Dylan in 2006. There was always something about that rebelliousness, that indefinable obstinacy, that set him apart. Haggard the poet once tried to summarize what might be learned from listening to his songs. “That I’m a contrary old son of a bitch, I guess,” Haggard said.


Merle Haggard timeline
Source: Nashville Songwriters Foundation
*April 6, 1937: Born in Oildale
*1947: Started playing guitar
*1951: First paying gig
*1953: At age 15 made stage debut, sitting in on a Lefty Frizzell
performance at Bakersfield’s Rainbow Gardens
*1956: First radio work on “The Smilin’ Jack Tyree Radio Show” in
Springville
* 1960: Gigged with band in clubs in the Bakersfield area
* 1962: Television gig on Cousin Herb Henson’s show in Bakersfield
* 1962: Signed by Tally Records, owned by close friend Lewis Talley
* 1963: First single as performer “Sing a Sad Song,” written by Wynn Stewart
*1965: “(From Now On All My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers” first major hit
(It went to No. 6 on the country charts for Roy Drusky)
*1965: Contract sold to Capitol Records
*1965: Formed backing band, The Fugitives
*1966: “Swinging Doors” first self-penned hit
* 1967: First number one hit “The Fugitive” (later titled “I'm a Lonesome
Fugitive”)
*1969: Released “Okie From Muskogee,” his first real venture into social
commentary; song went to No. 1
*1972: Pardoned by Gov. Ronald Reagan
*1973: Performed for the first time at the White House for Pat Nixon's
birthday party
*1977: Signed with MCA Records
*1981: Signed with Epic Records
*1990: Signed with Curb Records

Awards:
* 1965--ACM\Top Vocal Duet with Bonnie Owens
* 1965--ACM\Most Promising New Artist
* 1966--ACM\Top Vocal Duet with Bonnie Owens
* 1966--ACM\Top Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1967--ACM\Top Vocal Duet with Bonnie Owens
* 1967--Music City News\Male Artist of the Year
* 1968--Music City News\Male Artist of the Year
* 1969--NSAI\Songwriter of the Year
* 1969--ACM\Top Vocal Duet with Bonnie Owens/Johnny Mosby & Jonie
* 1969--ACM\Top Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1969--ACM\Album of the Year\Okie From Muskogee
* 1969--ACM\Single of the Year\Okie From Muskogee
* 1969--ACM\Song of the Year, Composer\Okie From Muskogee
* 1969--ACM\Song of the Year, Artist\Okie From Muskogee
* 1970--CMA\Entertainer of the Year
* 1970--CMA\Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1970--CMA\Single of the Year\Okie From Muskogee
* 1970--CMA\Album of the Year\Okie From Muskogee
* 1970--ACM\Entertainer of the Year
* 1970--ACM\Top Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1970--Music City News\Songwriter of the Year
* 1972--CMA\Album of the Year\Let Me Tell You About A Song
* 1972--ACM\Top Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1974--ACM\Top Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1981--NSAI\Songwriter of the Year
* 1981--ACM\Top Male Vocalist of the Year
* 1982--ACM\Song of the Year, Artist\Are the Good Times Really Over
* 1982--ACM\Song of the Year, Composer\Are the Good Times Really Over
* 1983--CMA\Vocal Duo of the Year with Willie Nelson
* 1984--Grammy\Best Country Vocal Performance, Male\"That's The Way Love
Goes"
* 1989--Music City News\Living Legend
* 1994--County Music Hall of Fame induction
* Granted a full and unconditional pardon for "past crimes" on March 21,
1972; signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan
* The Strangers, Haggard's touring band, has been awarded "Touring Band
of the year" in 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1981, and 1987 by the
Academy of Country Music (ACM)
* Has had the following albums go gold: "Okie From Muskogee" (1970), "The
Fightin' Side of Me" (1971), "The Best of Merle Haggard" (1972), "The Best
of the Best of Merle Haggard" (1974), "Big City" (1981), "Poncho and Lefty"
(1982), and "Eleven Winners" (1989)
* Nominated 43 times for CMA awards, more than any other entertainer
* Has received 56 BMI citations
* Has appeared in the following feature films: "Bronco Billy,"
"Huckleberry Finn," "Killers Three," (featuring the song "Mama Tried") and
"Doc Elliot;" has appeared on the television series "The Waltons" and
"Centennial"


Product Title: Legends in American Music: Merle Haggard
Product Description: A career retrospective with extended liner notes.
TOTAL Configuration: 3 CDs, 60 tracks
Prices: $39.98
Guarantee: 25,000 Units
Territory: US and Canada
Primary Label: Two EMI, One Sony BMG
A & R Contact: Colin Escott


TRACK ARTIST MAN. LABEL SOURCE OWNER YEAR CHARTS

DISC 1



Sing a Sad Song Merle Haggard EMI Tally Untamed Hawk (Bear Family)
EMI 1963 #19


(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers Merle Haggard EMI Tally Untamed
Hawk (Bear Family) EMI 1965 #10


Swingin’ Doors Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear Family)
EMI 1966 #5


The Bottle Let Me Down Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear
Family) EMI 1966 #3


The Fugitive Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear Family)
EMI 1966 #1


I Threw away the Rose Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear
Family) EMI 1967 #2


Branded Man Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear Family)
EMI 1967 #1


Sing Me Back Home Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear
Family) EMI 1967 #1


The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed
Hawk (Bear Family) EMI 1968 #1


I Started Loving You Again aka Today, I Started Merle Haggard EMI
Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear Family) EMI 1968


Mama Tried Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed Hawk (Bear Family) EMI
1968 #1


I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Untamed
Hawk (Bear Family) EMI 1968 #3


Hungry Eyes Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road (Cap) EMI
1969 #1


Workin’ Man Blues Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road (Cap)
EMI 1969 #1


Okie from Muskogee Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road (Cap)
EMI 1969 #1 & #41 pop


Fightin’ Side of Me Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road (Cap)
EMI 1970 #1


Someday We’ll Look Back Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road
(Cap) EMI 1970 #2


Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man) Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every
Road (Cap) EMI 1971 #1


Carolyn Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road (Cap) EMI 1971
#1


Grandma Harp Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road (Cap) EMI
1972 #1

DISC 2



It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad) Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every
Road EMI 1972 #1


I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down
Every Road EMI 1972 #1


Everybody's Had the Blues Merle Haggard/Melba Montgomery UA EMI
Capitol Down Every Road EMI 1973 #1


If We Make It Through December Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every
Road EMI 1973 #1


Things Aren't Funny Anymore Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every
Road EMI 1974 #1


Old Man from the Mountain Merle Haggard/Tammy W. EMI Capitol
Hag--Best of MH 2006 EMI 1974 #1


Kentucky Gambler Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road EMI
1974 #1


Always Wanting You Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road EMI
1975 #1


Movin' On Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Down Every Road EMI 1975 #1


It's All in the Movies Merle Haggard/Tammy W. EMI Capitol Down Every
Road EMI 1975 #1


The Roots of My Raising Merle Haggard EMI Capitol Capitol Collectors
Series EMI 1975 #1


Cherokee Maiden Merle Haggard/Tammy W. EMI Capitol Capitol
Collectors Series EMI 1976 #1


If We're Not Back in Love by Monday Merle Haggard EMI MCA Millennium
CD Uni 1977 #2


Ramblin' Fever Merle Haggard/Tammy W. EMI MCA Millennium CD Uni
1977 #2


I'm Always on a Mountain when I Fall Merle Haggard EMI MCA Millennium
CD Uni 1978 #2


It's Been a Great Afternoon Merle Haggard EMI MCA Down Every Road
Uni 1978 #2


The Way I Am Merle Haggard/Tammy W. EMI MCA Millennium CD Uni 1980
#2


I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink Merle Haggard/Johnny Paycheck
EMI MCA Down Every Road Uni 1978 #7


When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again Merle Haggard EMI MCA not on
CD Uni 1977


Misery and Gin Merle Haggard MCA UNI

DISC 3



My Favorite Memory Merle Haggard Sony Epic Essential MH The Epic
Years Sony 1981 #1


Big City Merle Haggard Sony Epic Big City reissue CD Sony 1982 #1


Yesterday's Wine Haggard/G. Jones Sony Epic Essential MH The Epic
Years Sony 1982 #1


Going Where the Lonely Go Merle Haggard/Merle Haggard Sony Epic Sony
Epic Essential MH The Epic Years Sony 1982 #1


You Take Me for Granted Merle Haggard Sony Epic Down Every Road
Sony 1983 #1


What Am I Gonna Do (With the Rest of My Life) Merle Haggard/Ray Charles
Sony Epic Goin' Where the Lonely Go/That's the WayŠ S&P CD Sony 1983
#3


Pancho and Lefty Haggard/Willie Nelson Sony Epic Sony Epic Essential
MH The Epic Years Sony 1983 #1


That's the Way Love Goes Merle Haggard Sony Epic Essential MH The
Epic Years Sony 1983 #1


Someday When Things Are Good Merle Haggard Sony Epic Essential MH
The Epic Years Sony 1984 #1


Let's Chase Each Other Around the Room Merle Haggard Sony Epic
Essential MH The Epic Years Sony 1984 #1


A Place to Fall Apart Merle Haggard Sony Epic Essential MH The Epic
Years Sony 1984 #1


Natural High Merle Haggard Sony Epic Love Songs 2004 reiss. Sony
1985 #1


Out Among the Stars Merle Haggard Sony Epic not on CD Sony 1986
#21


Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star Merle Haggard Sony Epic Essential MH The
Epic Years Sony 1987 #1


Are the Good Times Really Over Merle Haggard Sony Epic Big City
reissue CD Sony 1982 #2


Haggard (Like Never Before) Merle Haggard Sony Hag Like Never Before
Hag 2003


Lonesome Day Merle Haggard Sony Hag Like Never Before Hag 2003


Wishing All These Old Things Were New Merle Haggard Sony Anti If I
Could Only Fly Anti or Hag 2000


Some of Us Fly Haggard/Toby Keith Sony Capitol Chicago Wind EMI
2005


America First Merle Haggard Sony Capitol Chicago Wind EMI 2005