Pages tagged “merle haggard”

WXPN, everyone's favorite non-commercial radio station out of the University of Pennsylvania, has announced plans to start a new radio and web-based series called "Power of Song." Launching exclusively for September, the series hopes to bring attention to the importance of music in culture by exploring "the intersection between music and politics, tracing the history of music rich in social commentary."

At 10 a.m., at his sprawling 200-acre Lake Shasta estate in northern California, Merle Haggard is already deep into his daily chores, washing the breakfast dishes before he and his wife Theresa stroll out to tend the celery, shallots and cherry tomatoes growing organically in their garden. Although he’ll be touring soon to promote three recent albums—solo set, Chicago Wind; a duets collection with George Jones, Kickin’ Out The Footlights... Again; and Last Of The Breed, a brand-new 22-track showcase with longtime chums Ray Price and Willie Nelson—he delights in such mundane duties. When you hit 69, he sighs, putting down his dishcloth, “You’ve gotta have some sort of routine in your mind, you’ve gotta come up with things to entertain yourself. You’ve gotta come up with lies that distract you from things that you know are inevitable, because right down the road somewhere, you and I—in the wink of an eye—are gonna meet our maker.”

Depressing? Anything but, guffaws Haggard, who’s always been a bit of a philosopher. Mortality? “We don’t wanna sit around and dwell on that,” he declares. “We’ve gotta come up with something to satisfy ourselves, like ‘Aw, maybe there’ll be something that’ll happen before it comes our time, and maybe we won’t have to die!’ Why, I was wondering just this morning, ‘What if tomorrow comes early? It’d be a big-time collision, wouldn’t it?’ I know it’s not possible, but it’s ridiculously funny. And it’s what we talk about, and what crosses your mind every morning when you get to be my age—you say, ‘Oh! Still another day, huh?’”

Haggard isn’t waiting on any cosmic answers. He’s happy with the riddles themselves. So he just keeps right on doing what he’s done since the early ’60s—writing, recording, performing and enjoying the sparse downtime in between. “I think each one of us has some pre-ordained situation that we’re supposed to follow,” he says. “Now, we may vary from that and go off in different directions, as humans will do. But I think that there is some route we’re supposed to stick with, and each one of us is indelibly gifted with that, just like a fingerprint.”

SLINGS AND ARROWS Lord knows the country legend struggled against his destiny for many colorful years. After his father’s death, the Oklahoma transplant left his Bakersfield, Calif., home—a converted railroad carriage—at 14 and started hopping actual working boxcars to see the country. The journey didn’t end well. After landing in several reformatories, Hag—as he would soon be known—did a three-year stint in San Quentin for armed robbery. But it was there, in 1958, that he witnessed and was inspired by one of Johnny Cash’s infamous prison performances. Haggard was paroled (later receiving a full pardon from then-governor Ronald Reagan and the California Supreme Court) and barreled back into Bakersfield just as its Buck Owens-helmed, electric-guitar-centered scene was revving to life.

“I tried to enlist in the Marines when I was 14, and I would’ve been in Korea,” Haggard recalls. “But they wouldn’t let me in, and instead I was riding boxcars. … I’m proud of it—I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. I’ve had so many things happen in my young years that I actually believe was meant to be education, and I don’t think it was meant to be anything else. And as it turned out, 12 Supreme Court judges from the state of California saw fit to give me a pardon. And I probably wouldn’t have done any time at all if I’d have been a rich boy. But I was just a poor kid, so I got to experience some things that I would never have understood [otherwise].”

With a thumbs-up from Cash—a ‘Hey, didn’t I see you in the crowd at San Quentin?’ quip on his TV show—Haggard started scoring late-’60s hits with prison-themed originals like “Mama Tried,” “The Fugitive” and “Sing Me Back Home,” tracks that would influence later country renegades like Gram Parsons. While his tongue-in-cheek redneck anthems “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side Of Me” were eagerly taken by Republicans like Nixon and George Wallace at face value, Hag leans brazenly left with new songs like “Chicago Wind” and the staunchly anti-war “Rebuild America First” (“Let’s get out of Iraq / And get back on the track”). His voice, despite time’s seasoning, is every bit as hickory-stick booming as it was in his “Okie” era.

MISCHIEF AT ANY AGE
Price and Nelson are also in fine form on the Fred Foster-produced Breed. Haggard contributed a new cut (“Sweet Jesus”), as did Nelson (“Back To Earth”), but mostly it’s just three Country Music Hall of Famers crooning classics like “Night Watch,” “Why Me, Lord,” “Heartaches By The Number” and “Mom And Dad’s Waltz,” over echo-y arrangements often backed by The Jordanaires. It was Price who initially came up with the trio concept; He convinced Nelson, who then phoned Haggard, who explains, “this was bound to happen anyway—we’ve been recording and doing each other’s material, doing shows together for so many years,”

The sessions reportedly spanned a whopping two days, and a spring tour is also on the docket, sure to be a party with the notorious Nelson in tow. But it’s the 81-year-old Price who worries Hag the most. “He loved his chickens, and he gave me a rooster one time, a big fighting cock, and he knew that I didn’t have no place to carry that sonofabitch. I was about 26 years old, and he was having fun with the young kid—he gave me this goddamn chicken, and it flew all over the bus and shit on everything. And don’tcha know Ray just laughed! So he’s got something planned for this tour, I just know it.”

“Life’s been good to me,” Haggard concludes. “I’ve gotta look at it that way. I’ve been fortunate enough to maintain good health, I’ve got a 14-year-old son whom I’m very proud of, and I think four or five great-grandsons. I’ve got a pretty wife, and if I live to April 6th, I’ll be 70 years on this Earth. And touring for me is like swimming—it’s really good exercise and good for the health.”

RAY PRICE COMES FULL CIRCLE
Like his pal Merle, Ray Price has a rural routine each non-tour day. “I’m up at 6 o’clock in the morning,” he outlines, while roosters crow and hens cluck in the coop where he’s scattering grain. “We have 17 thoroughbred racehorses, and we have to feed ’em, take ’em outta their stalls and put ’em in the paddocks. Then we feed the chickens, the racing pigeons, the bird dogs and the little rabbit beagles—it’s quite a job, but it’s something I like.”

Did Price really play fowl on Hag’s bus? “It’s not true at all, though Merle may think it is,” he says, laughing. “But chickens are a hobby I’ve had for years—I just love ’em, and I ship mine all over the world.” Price, who once roomed with Hank Williams, switched to an orchestra and dinner jacket for his “Good Times” ’60s. Now, with Last of the Breed, he’s returned to his honky-tonk roots. And the irony doesn’t escape him.

“Our music has been refused to be played by the power-that-be and all the radio stations,” growls the artist, who cites the late ’70s “Urban Cowboy” movement as the beginning of country’s end. “… But now, all of a sudden, the people have rebelled and stations have started playing the classics again. I’m not mad at the people—they’re out to make money. But they sure did hurt us for a long time.

“But now everything’s cool, everything’s fine, and my career looks like it’s beginning to bloom open again. And that just tickles me to death, ’cause what greater blessing could you have at the age I’m at?”

When the time arrived to honor country music legend Merle Haggard, no tribute album or collectible figurine was good enough, at least not for the residents of his hometown.

The board supervisors in Oildale, Calif., held an open meeting on December 19 and voted 4-1 to honor Haggard with the original gift that keeps on giving—that’s right, his very own road.

A 3.5 mile stretch of asphalt on 7th Standard Road between Highway 99 and North Chester Avenue will be newly dubbed Merle Haggard Drive as soon as his fans raise the estimated $41,500 necessary to change the street signs. Haggard was born in Oildale in 1937 and inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994.

In early February, Merle will hit the road (no, not Merle Haggard Drive) with George Jones in support of their 2006 collaboration, titled Kickin' Out the Footlights... Again.

Tour dates include:

February
7 - Bakersfield CA @ Fox Theatre
8 - Jackson CA @ Jackson Rancheria Casino
9 - Oakland CA @ Paramount Theatre
10 - Portland OR @ Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
11 - Seattle WA @ Paramount Theatre
12 - Spokane WA @ Opera House at INB Performing Arts Center
14 - Billings MT @ Alberta Bair Theatre
15 - Helena MT @ Civic Center
16 - Wendover NV @ Peppermill Casino
17 - Wendover NV @ Peppermill Casino

Related links:
Merle Haggard’s official site
Merle Haggard on MySpace

Before bands like The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers merged country and rock music, musicians from the two genres rarely mingled; they were more likely to flash a one-fingered salute than a peace sign to one another. Merle Haggard was a country musician, no apologies offered, and he let it be known he was willing and able to kick the sissy ass of any longhaired, psychedelicized hippie who felt inclined to burn a draft card or run down his beloved U.S. of A. In 1969 and ’70, at the height of the bitter cultural chasm that divided the country over the Vietnam War, Haggard sang “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” love-it-or-leave-it mortar shells lobbed in the general direction of the counterculture, notable as much for their inflammatory rhetoric as for their plainspoken patriotism.

As a countercultural wannabe at the time, possessed of a sissy hippie ass in the making, I could take a not-so-subtle hint. Merle may have played well in Muskogee, but in my neck of the post-Woodstock woods he was Public Redneck #1. If I thought about him at all, I thought about him with the smugness that comes from the certainty of one’s beliefs.

So maybe you learn something along the way. Merle Haggard has some tenacious beliefs of his own, one of them being the notion that regular people matter. They’re stuck in prison cells, driving big rigs, working the fields and drinking too much on the weekends, but not enough to drown the memories of lost loves and raw deals. So these days I’m more inclined to think Merle Haggard is Johnny Cash without the hip cachet, a no frills storyteller with an untamed colt of a voice and a penchant for nailing the desperate realities of hardscrabble lives. You can taste the dirt in Merle’s music. And he’s left a body of songs that stand with Guthrie, Dylan, Cash and Springsteen in giving voice to those who otherwise had no voice. For almost 25 years, from the mid ’60s through the late ’80s, Haggard made a series of albums for Capitol, MCA and Epic that ought to be celebrated as some of the best in American music. Now that country is dominated by future aerobics instructors and popsters in cowboy hats, it’s good to remember the real deal. There were thousands of ramblers and hellraisers before him, dead-end Okie kids out in California’s Central Valley, driven from their homes by dust only to find themselves enslaved by the dirt again. But Merle just happened to write songs that could sear your soul.

It came about in the most unlikely of places. The Central Valley city that gave the Bakersfield sound its name was a blue-collar agricultural and oil-refinery center in the early ’60s. With their bands honed to perfection in the town’s rowdy juke joints, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and a host of formidable companions came through the swinging barroom doors and into mainstream America with lilting pedal steel, a straight-ahead backbeat and Fender Telecasters blazing away. It was as far removed from the string-heavy, polite Nashville countrypolitan sound of the time as could be imagined. Early songs like “Swinging Doors” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” perfectly capture the ethos of the honky tonks; they’re the quintessential truckstop jukebox anthems. But, within a year, Merle had moved on to more autobiographical material, frankly addressing his wayward youth and prison years in songs such as “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home” and “Mama Tried,” one of the most bleak and clear-eyed self-assessments ever recorded. In the end, the many musical styles he incorporated into his music didn’t matter. He found his authentic voice, that plain-as-dirt wisdom, in Western swing tunes, Jimmie Rodgers blue yodels, hard-edged honky-tonk stompers and country-folk protest songs. And he certainly found it on classic weepers like “Today I Started Loving You Again,” where he distilled sorrow into two minutes and twenty seconds.

And he found it, sort of, on “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” I still don’t like those songs. But now I hear things I didn’t hear before. On “The Fightin’ Side of Me” he sings, “I don’t mind ’em switchin’ sides / And standin’ up for things they believe in.” And that’s all Merle Haggard has been saying for the past 40 years. So maybe I’m willing to cut him some slack. I listen to him rip through a song like “Workin’ Man Blues,” with that Telecaster roaring behind him, and politics are the farthest thing from my mind:

Sometimes I think about leaving, do a little bummin’ around I wanna throw my bills out the window catch a train to another town But I go back working I gotta buy my kids a brand new pair of shoes Yeah drink a little beer in a tavern, Cry a little bit of these working man blues

These days a lot of working men are likely to tap away on a computer keyboard for a living. They probably didn’t spend their 21st birthdays in prison, doin’ life without parole. So maybe they don’t understand. But maybe it’s not all that different; maybe it’s just rednecks and old hippies, all bustin’ butt for The Man. And maybe Merle nailed that one, too. Looks like Mama did all right, after all.