In a bus parked behind the Pepsi-Cola Roadhouse, Bonnie Owens is answering yet another question about being Haggard's ex-wife. Owens met Haggard in 1965, when she was working as a cocktail waitress and singing one evening a week at the Blackboard. "I thought he was a great singer and real good-looking," recalls Owens. "Merle just got out of prison and he was so bashful." Over time, Owens became his closest confidante and occasional songwriting partner.

"Everything Merle would say that struck me as profound, I would write down," she says. "Later, he would never remember saying it. We have kind of a mental telepathy." After a 1967 concert in Dallas, Haggard asked Owens to get him a hamburger. When she returned several minutes later, Haggard had written the lyrics to "Today I Started Loving You Again" on a brown paper bag. She says it is one of her favorite memories.

Owens still works with Haggard's band, which is even more unusual than it first seems because Haggard has been married five times. "We were married for about two years or something like that," says Owens. (In fact, they were married for 13.) "Actually, we never should have done it. He's like my little boy, if that makes any sense to you. My mother instinct comes out around Merle."

Apparently, it is not an uncommon sentiment. Owens is best friends with wife No. 3, Leona Williams, and Debbie Parret, Haggard's fourth wife, still works for Hag Inc. Haggard seems as devoted to the people from his past as he is to favorite old songs, and more than a few of those who travel with him, like longtime producer Fuzzy Owen, have known him for almost 40 years.

Though he continued to chart hits well into the 1980s, Haggard says he burned through more than $100 million during that decade thanks to an ill-advised investment in a resort, an antique-car collection, some costly divorces and what he describes as a nonstop party on his Lake Shasta houseboat. In 1993 he filed for Chapter 11 and, somewhat astonishingly, sold a portion of his song catalog for an undisclosed sum to Sony Tree publishing.

"I finally grew up when I turned 50," he says. "A person cannot do all he wants to do. If you have an energetic mind, you must make your choices. Don't choose too many things because you may fuck up on all of them. That's what I finally learned, I think."

Today, Haggard lives in Northern California near Lake Shasta in a compound called Shade Tree Manor, which also contains his studio. With his wife Theresa, and their two young children, Haggard seems to have come closer to the contentment that has eluded him in the past. On "If I Could Only Fly," he included several songs about his family that can be cautiously described as happy.

Nashville radio lost interest in Haggard and his generation of performers years ago in favor of what he calls the "flat bellies," and he hasn't had a hit since 1990. As always, however, Haggard continues to write. "I'm always looking for ways to describe things that are simple but beautiful," he says. "I write four or five songs every month. They are all good." He laughs. "The ones that stay with me, the ones I don't have to write down, are the ones we record."

The new record, his strongest in years, finds Haggard more adventurous than ever. A '20s-style jazz romp alternates with Western swing, and there is even a bossa nova ballad called "Crazy Moon." His voice has deepened and lost some of its force, but its timbre has grown warmer with age. There's also a new looseness to the singing, and newly exotic vocal inflections can be heard on the late Blaze Foley's magnificent title track.

He says that his next project, which is nearly in the can, will be a collection of antique pop standards, "similar to what Willie Nelson did with 'Stardust.'" Haggard sings a few measures of "All of Me," suddenly lost in the song, and for a moment he appears to be a man suspended blissfully out of time. "Songs, I think, are more important than human beings," he says. "They really are. They live on forever."

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