Merle Haggard, country legend

Merle Haggard was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1937, and died on his 79^th birthday…his family were “Okies”, farming people who had moved from Oklahoma, to California, during the Depression when the “dust bowl” destroyed farms in their home state, and reduced them to a desperate condition, with no option but to pack up and leave.  They made the trip west in their cars, hoping for a new life.  John Steinbeck’s novel, Grapes of Wrath, is about this terrible time in US history.
They were poor, and Merle’s music reflected that.  Like most country singers of his generation, he had experienced the poverty and social problems that he wrote about in his songs… They were born in rural poverty, and isolation.  Family was often all the wealth that they had, and  even then, their families were not immune to the many issues that affected most people in the 20^th century, such as desertion or divorce, children “going off the rails”, harsh parenting.  Country music was the white working class blues; it was about the real life experiences of the singers who wrote the songs, which were often sneered at by the more fortunate or educated.

As a boy, Merle loved music and played the guitar, but he was often in trouble with the law.  His father’s death left him lost and he got into more and more trouble.  in his teens he ran away from home, and then got into trouble with the law, and spent time in various juvenile detention centres, from which he escaped.   At the age of 20, he was serving time in prison, San Quentin, when Johnny Cash played a concert there.  Merle resolved to straighten himself out. He was traumatised by the more appalling aspects of prison life, and wanted to get out.

Cash understood brushes with the law, and had made helping prisoners one of his causes. Merle got out of prison, and eventually he won a full pardon for his crime.  He got a job and gradually began to sing, and to start a successful career in country music.

Many of his songs were drawn from childhood experiences.  “Mama Tried” was about his family and how his mother had hoped to keep him from crime… “Sing me back home” also has a prison background.

One of his most famous songs was “Okie From Muskogee”- a semi humorous song about the clash of the values of Middle America and the hippies of the 1960s, who “smoke marijuana” and “make a party out of loving”.  He was ambivalent about the song... it was taken up by the conservatives as supporting the values of the “silent Majority”, but Merle saw it as praise for the old style ways and beliefs of his parents and grandparents, without being overly right wing. One of his other songs was Irma Jackson, about an inter-racial romance and in later life, he wrote songs against the Iraq War.   Although he performed for Nixon at the White House in the 70’s he was always willing to listen to protestors against the Vietnam War….
Merle’s love life was stormy.  He was married 5 times, and during the 1980s he developed a coke habit, which damaged his health to a degree.  But his musical career was fruitful and he loved his work.  He loved life, and worked hard, still performing even when he had had cancer.  Sadly I never saw him perform live, but I have loved his songs and his singing... Ever since as a child, I saw him in a small role in the Waltons.