Haggard was 9 when his father died, and his two much older siblings, Lowell and Lillian, were already living on their own. With Flossie now the family's sole breadwinner, Haggard found himself frequently alone and restless, shuttled between relatives and daydreaming about hoboing on the oil trains that ran beside their house. He first hopped a freight at 11, only to be returned home by the police, and despite his mother's pleas continued to cut classes and ride the rails.

Helpless at keeping up with her son, Flossie finally turned him over to the Kern County juvenile authority. By his own admission, Haggard spent more time in juvenile hall than he did in school, but liked it no better. Classified as incorrigible, Haggard quickly rose through the ranks of the California juvenile corrections system, spending time in increasingly severe reform schools, like the Preston School of Industry, the initials of which are still tattooed on his wrist.

He managed to escape each of them, and in between terms he roamed California and the Northwest, harvesting hay, roughnecking in oil fields, digging ditches and occasionally playing the guitar and singing for loose change and free beer. At 17 he married Leona Hobbs and fathered a child. In the meantime, his career of petty crime continued unabated as he scuffled, entered unlocked cars and stole and resold scrap metal. Haggard finally exhausted the patience of the juvenile system on a night in 1957 when, drunk on wine, he and a friend attempted to break into a restaurant that was still open for business. (The Kern County sheriff, however, said that he caught Haggard jumping out of a window with a stolen check-cashing machine.) He was 20 and facing five years in San Quentin.

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While in prison, Haggard discovered that his wife had given birth to another man's child. When he walked out of San Quentin in 1960 after serving roughly half of his five-year sentence, he expected to see his family waiting for him at the gate, but they were nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, Haggard took a bus back to Bakersfield and returned to Leona, a paroled ex-convict looking for work in San Joaquin Valley's blood-bucket honky-tonks.

It was a period of his life that came into focus again in the late '60s, when Haggard came into his own as a songwriter. His compositions had little use for the heartaches, honky-tonk angels and tear-drenched pillows that dominated the truncated vocabulary of country music at the time. They were rarely humorous, rejecting the wordplay and puns that drove much of Nashville's publishing. Instead, his songs relied on perfectly constructed narratives for their dramatic impact, and in their economy were nearly devoid of adjectives.

Haggard dramatized his reunion with the woman he loved in a song titled "My Ramona," in which a man returning from a long absence learns that his girlfriend or wife has become the town tramp. It is a wrenching composition not only because of the singer's denial of what we know to be the truth but because he believes he can still control the woman who has left him behind.

Everybody's talking bad about Ramona
They say she's changed a lot since I've been gone
They say she may not be too glad to see me
Because Ramona doesn't know I'm coming home

But everybody's wrong about Ramona
They're just going by the way she's acting now
I just can't believe the things they say about her
Because Ramona knows the things I won't allow

"Ramona was really Leona," says Haggard. "A lot of it is made to fit the song, but it was about real things. She was the whipping post in all the early songs, and she was the one I praised. There's a great story in the area between her and I." He pauses. "The reason we are not together now is only because of narcotics and what narcotics has done to her. She's a heroin addict; she goes in and out of that. The person that I met when we were kids does not exist anymore; she is dead. Once in a while I'll have to be honest with myself and say, 'The lady still holds a place in my heart. That little girl that I met back then, who's a daughter of a poor man who had to pick cotton for a living ...'" Haggard's voice trails off. "There's still a well of things to write about back there."

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After returning from San Quentin, Haggard gradually developed a modest following by playing honky-tonks around Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley -- places with names like High Pockets and the Lucky Spot. Brightly lit bars with worn wooden floors, jukeboxes and plywood bandstands, they attracted oil workers, farmers and Saturday-night drunks for an evening of dancing, fighting, whiskey and cigarettes.

Eventually, he was invited to appear on a local television show for which Roy Nichols, whom Haggard had first seen perform with the Maddox Brothers and Rose in the late '40s, was the house guitarist. ("I idolized him for 50 fucking years," Haggard says.) The show also featured a young singer named Bonnie Owens, who would become Haggard's second wife, and Lewis Talley and Fuzzy Owen, local performers whose Tally label released Haggard's first 45s.

It was another California honky-tonker, Wynn Stewart, who handed him his first hit. Having hired Haggard for a series of shows in Las Vegas, Stewart was about to cut "Sing a Sad Song" when the young singer asked Stewart to let him record it. In 1963, Stewart's generosity resulted in Haggard's first Top 20 entry, and soon Capitol Records bought his contract.

At Capitol, Haggard quickly became a star on the strength of his versions of several Liz Anderson compositions. Says Haggard, recalling when he first met Anderson, "They dragged me to her house at 4 a.m. 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 fucking songs, like 'All My Friends Are Going to 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.'"

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