Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
From prison and politics to rambling and romance, his journey has been, well, complicated. But austere lyrics and rich country jazz have made him one of music's masters.
Nov 14, 2000 | Merle Haggard is wandering through a Holiday Inn in Denver, looking for a chiropractor. He is touring again, and his back is stiff from the days spent on the bus. Yesterday he played the Rosebud Casino in Valentine, Neb., an establishment so rural that it is actually located in South Dakota but uses Valentine as an address. Before that he appeared at the Pepsi-Cola Roadhouse in Burkettstown, Pa., where a rib dinner was served during Haggard's performance. Denver is the last stop, but after a week at home Haggard will be back on the bus, stopping at the Horseshoe Casino in Bossier City, La., and at Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, Texas.
Back at his hotel room, he submits to a series of telephone interviews, staggered 30 minutes apart. Haggard has been known to be evasive with the press, but today he seems unfazed by the questions. All the activity is part of an effort to promote "If I Could Only Fly," his new CD for his latest record company, Epitaph/Anti, where he is now a label mate with Tom Waits and bands like Rancid and Agnostic Front.
Nicholas Dawidoff wrote that hearing George Jones speak is "a pleasure similar to waking up in Tuscany," and Haggard's melancholy baritone, instantly recognizable from his records, leaves the listener with a similar sensation. He speaks as though in a perpetual reverie and takes pauses so long they border on the uncomfortable. His voice becomes animated, however, when he recounts anecdotes about his musical heroes, like the one he heard from fiddler Johnny Gimble about Bob Wills hiring and firing Hank Williams.
"Bob and Hank were playing at the Opry when they got drunk together, and Bob hired him. The next morning when [Wills' guitarist Eldon] Shamblin woke up, he went to Bob and told him, 'Look -- I might be able to handle your ass when you're drunk, but I ain't even going to attempt to handle you and that skinny son of a bitch. It's either him or me.' Well, that's as long as Hank Williams lasted." Haggard roars with laughter.
Later, as though suddenly self-conscious about the pleasure he took in his reminiscence, Haggard's voice becomes clouded with sadness: "I've got 20-year-old grandkids. I am an old guy." He speaks about his son Marty's scathing exposé in the National Enquirer, his unfinished novel ("The Sins of John Tom Mullen") and what he views as the decline of personal freedom in America. Then he brightens again. "That's pessimism," he says after a long pause. "Finally, what I do is exactly what I want to do."
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Certain facts of Merle Haggard's life are so well documented that they have become clichés. It is widely known that in the late 1960s he became a star on the strength of songs about his experiences in San Quentin (Calif.) State Prison. Incarceration, however, is a minor theme compared with his preoccupation with the Depression. In songs like "Hungry Eyes" and "Tulare Dust," Haggard sings about the labor camps, the hobo jungles and the oil and cotton fields that his parents, along with their first two children, Haggard's older siblings, confronted when they came to Bakersfield, Calif., from Chekotah, Okla., in 1934. James and Flossie Haggard were among the half-million refugees who arrived in California in the 1930s searching for a respite from the ravages of the Dust Bowl.
"Those were terrible times," said Buck Owens, Bakersfield's other country star, whose family also numbered among the "Okie" migrants. "I don't remember 'em very good and I'm glad I don't." But for Haggard, the time just prior to his birth has become a paradoxical wellspring of inspiration, the repository of devastating family memories and an idealized America more natural and free than our own.
Born in 1937 in Oildale, a glorified labor camp separated from Bakersfield by the Kern River, Haggard grew up in an abandoned "reefer," or refrigerated train car, which his father had converted into a home. It still stands at 1303 Yosemite Drive. Though James laid down his fiddle for good when Flossie found religion, the Haggards sang quartet music from the popular Stamps-Brumley songbooks and gathered around the radio to listen to Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra.
As a toddler, Haggard recalls pointing to the radio and asking for "stewed ham"-- country singer Stuart Hamblen's 4 p.m. broadcasts from Los Angeles. Hamblen's music, however, was an anomaly on the predominantly pop radio of the day. "There were no such things as country music radio stations," recalls Haggard. "There was a guy [who was on] once a week, who played something called hillbilly music for maybe 15 minutes in the morning. The only time you heard anything other than pop music was Bob Wills."
The bandleader whose Texas Playboys played a hybrid of big-band swing, cowboy ballads, country and blues, Wills captivated Haggard like no one else on the radio. Based for a period in nearby Fresno, Wills' band featured vocalist Tommy Duncan, whose easy, soulful delivery borrowed as much from the black jazz singers of the day as from the raw country style of singers like Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.
Music would not become Haggard's obsession until several years later, shortly after Duncan left the Playboys, and a Bakersfield DJ began playing the records of a new singer from Corsicana, Texas. "The country was suffering the loss of Tommy Duncan," says Haggard, with only mild exaggeration. "And if you were into music and loved it, it was like the main cleanup hitter had been taken out of your favorite team. Then here comes this guy named Lefty Frizzell."
Frizzell's sudden takeover of country radio has yet to be duplicated. "I Love You a Thousand Ways," the wayward apology to his wife that became his first single, was released in the last days of October 1950; a little more than a year later, Frizzell held four of the top 10 spots on Billboard's hillbilly charts and had become America's most popular country singer.
"Oh, God, he was unbelievable," Haggard says of Frizzell. "He was different. He had his own tone, his own subject matter he wrote about because 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 the only vocabulary he knew, because he wasn't all that bright. He was just a young Texas kid that had a very loving sort of family." As tribute to Frizzell, the adolescent Haggard learned to imitate the singer's quavering delivery. "It was a challenge to imitate Lefty," Haggard says. "When he did those little curls and things it was like learning jazz chords."
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