“If you don’t love America, you should leave it. And if you do love it, then stay here and try to fix the sonofabitch.”
Merle Haggard: The Penthouse Interview
With very little fanfare indeed, Merle Haggard has quietly risen to the pinnacle of country- music success — and in the process has helped down-home country music achieve sudden prominence. An endangered musical species only a decade ago, the country sound has since become the hottest-selling item disced out by U.S. record companies. Haggard, an intensely proud man, has been a leader in its resurgence, along with such other country luminaries as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings,. Charley Pride, Charlie Rich, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.
Of them all, however, the man they call The Hag perhaps best expresses the country singer’s traditional preoccupation with such eternal verities as respect, loyalty, and friendship-and with such time-honored potential nemeses as whiskey, women, and the law. Like the best country balladeers, Haggard has “lived” what he calls his “hurtin’ songs” to such a thorough extent that when he sings “I’ve Done It All,” he is merely reporting on a life that, until 1960, appeared to be totally misspent.
Born in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 6, 1937, Haggard is the son of a hard-working farm couple that headed west from Oklahoma during the depression. When the family settled in Bakersfield, Haggard’s father went to work for the Santa Fe railroad. Merle was nine when his father died, and with his mother, Flossie, working during the day, he soon became an adventurous wanderer. By the time he was fourteen, he was regularly cutting school. At a juvenile correctional institution, he got in with youthful criminals and became an outlaw in the truest sense of the word. By the time he was twenty-three, he had already served six years behind bars. Freed from prison in 1960, Haggard straightened out his life and began singing at a series of small clubs. After several hit records had established him on the corn-pone circuit, “Okie from Muskogee” made him both a superstar and a millionaire. Since then, Haggard has solidified his position as one of the most gifted and respected performers in country-music history.
After Penthouse sent free-lancer Lawrence Linderman to track down the thirty-nine-year-old singer, Linderman reported: “The word on Merle Haggard is that he goes his own way and is so unconcerned with the press that he’s virtually impossible to interview, unless you happen to bump into him on the road and he feels like talking that day. With that in mind, I took my chances and headed for Las Vegas, where Haggard was appearing at the Sahara Hotel. When I drove into town, I got in touch with Fuzzy Owen, Haggard’s manager. He arranged for the Penthouse interview sessions to be conducted in Haggard’s dressing room, between Merle’s two nightly performances.
“The first evening I came by, however, Haggard wasn’t up to talking. Earlier in the day he’d arm-wrestled every member of the band, and he was in such acute pain as to be unable to play his fiddle. The Sahara management dispatched a doctor to Haggard’s dressing room, and the young M.D. — a country boy himself — told Haggard he’d torn chest muscle away from the bone. Haggard was asked to lie on the floor and was given a concerted, somewhat painful massage — during which he nonetheless giggled like a kid every time the doctor’s fingers pinpointed down into the affected muscle. Five members of Haggard’s crew, slugging away at their beers, laughed even louder. The group acts much like a close-knit family.
“The next night I watched Haggard perform (he’s got a beautifully clear and strong voice), and he received a warm, enthusiastic reception from an S.R.O. audience. When we later sat down to talk, Haggard mentioned that Las Vegas crowds are tamer than the audiences he used to play for, and that remark led to the opening question of our interview.”
Until just a few years ago, you and your band had a reputation for somehow igniting assorted brawls, mayhem, and general violence wherever you played. Was that a bum rap?
Haggard: No, ’cause it really did happen. For a long time, we were like the late Bob Wills’s band. Roy Nichols, my lead guitar player, says that Wills’s music would make you want to either fuck or fight, and a helluva lot of both went on at any dance Bob played at. We were like that, too. I still don’t know what it was, but our music would just get everybody gain’. I remember one night in Amarillo. The owner of the dance hall we were playing picked us up when we got to town and told me, “Merle, we’ve had this club for five years. We have a real fine reputation, and we never had a fight yet.” I said, “Well, I hate to tell you this, but we’ll fix that reputation right quick.” And sure enough, we hadn’t been playin’ twenty minutes when the damnedest fight broke out that you ever seen. They tore that whole sonofabitch up!
Are we correct in assuming you’ve played more than your share of the kind of grubby country bars that Glen Campbell calls “fightin’ and dancin’ clubs”?
Haggard: When I was coming up, I worked in every kind of club you can think of; and yeah, some of ’em were rougher than others. I can recall one really unfriendly place down in Hugo, Okla. I was onstage, playin’ and watchin’ guys beat each other to a pulp, when somebody came runnin’ up to me and said, “Hey, a couple of ole boys are tryin’ to break into your camper to get at your wife.” I stopped what I was doing, ran and got my pistol, and bluffed those jokers out. All kinds of crazy things used to happen in them dance halls.
Do you ever miss those days?
Haggard: Yeah. And about two years ago I made the mistake of thinking l’d enjoy gettin’ back into that scene; so I agreed to play the Reo Palm Isle dance hall in Longview, Tex. The place was built to hold about 900 people; and when we got there, a crowd of about 3,000 was waitin’ for us. People were all over the stage and all over Roy Nichols and my bass player, and I couldn’t get a decent note out of none of the guys. That was the last time we played one of them places; it’s just a lot easier playing coliseums and showrooms.
And a lot more lucrative, especially since the nation’s appetite for country music has increased to the point where even singers like Andy Williams are starting to come on like Ferlin Husky. Does this sudden profusion of supperclub, rhinestone cowboys disturb you?
Haggard: Not a whole hell of a lot. I know of big entertainers who haven’t done very well in their own fields for a long time and who’ve seen the success of country music; so they’ve cut a couple of country records. They do well for a short period of time, but I don’t think they’re going to shit the country-music public for long. I’ve never seen anyone who can shit ’em. The A-number-one rule about country music is sincerity. I’ve found that my audiences look for that, and I just try to be honest with them.
Is the business side of country music similarly sincere?
Haggard: No, and I found that out right quick. And it irritates me. I think you should be able to depend on a man’s handshake, but you can’t do that in this business. It’s like a man’s word is worth nothing and a piece of paper is worth everything, and that’s just no good. People in my organization have never needed more than a hand-shake; and I’ve never even signed a contract with my manager, Fuzzy Owen, and we’ve been together for fifteen years. I’d better correct that a little: I believe we may have drawn up some kind of thing to protect his family, but we never signed anything to protect us against each other. Anyway, I just don’t like how people act when they get to talkin’ business. So I always say that it’s not my bag and that I’m not business minded. Maybe I’m not, ’cause the truth is, I’d rather go fishing than negotiate a contract — and I’ve actually done just that on a couple of occasions. The thing is, I just won’t do what I don’t want to do.
“I don’t know any people who’ve gotten to the top, and if there is such a place, I bet they were so busy they didn’t know they were there.”
Has that attitude ever hurt your career?
Haggard: I don’t think so, but it has got me into a couple of jams. One time I was hired by CBS-TV to play Curly in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, which is a show where people sing “Everything’s Up-to-Date In Kansas City” and stuff like that. Minnie Pearl and Jeannie C. Riley were in the cast; so I guess it was all right. The one thing I told the producers at the beginning was that I wouldn’t do a bunch of dancin’ and crap like that. And they said fine: we’d have six days of rehearsal, and they’d film it for worldwide television.
But then they went back on their word. As the week progressed … they had some funny boys around there — in fact, I think the whole goddamn crew was funny — who kept insisting that I dance, until the thing really got on my nerves. During rehearsal one night, I saw Fuzzy Owen standin’ behind the curtain, and as me and Jeannie C. Riley danced by, I said to him, “Fuzzy, on my next round past you I’m gain’ straight to the bus.”
Well, the people from the show all followed me out there and wanted to know what the hell was wrong. I told ’em, “Look, it’s a big mistake for me to do this show, because you got me doin’ what you said I wouldn’t have to do — all this dancin’ and choreography crap. I just don’t see what my fans are gonna identify with. Those truck drivers ain’t gonna understand all this, and I don’t blame ’em. It’s bad for me, and I don’t enjoy it; so I’m gettin’ out.”
They argued and said there was only one day left before filming started. But I told ’em I wasn’t gonna do it, and if they wanted to file a lawsuit to just go on and get the thing over with. It actually ended up okay: they got somebody to take my place, and I never heard a word about it afterward.
You seem to be very much of a traditionalist about your music. Does it bother you that such singers as Olivia Newton-John and John Denver have been walking off with the bulk of country-music awards?
Haggard: Well, I guess it’s a fact that there’s two kinds of country music — the old style and what you might call modern country, the kind sung by the two singers you just mentioned. Now I think Olivia Newton-John, for example, makes fine records. But as far as calling them down-home country — well, the instrumentation is down-home country, but her English accent doesn’t quite seem to fit. I’m a fan of hers and I dig her records, but for Olivia to win the Country Music Association’s female-singer-of-the-year award — I think it was a bad mistake. It should have gone to someone who’d had records and albums out for years, not to someone who’d had three hits, who doesn’t write her own songs, and who has a producer to tell her what to sing. I also think that anyone who wins the biggest award in country music should know who Hank Williams is. This may or may not be true, but I’ve heard it said that Olivia was asked if she liked Hank Williams and she answered, “Yes, and I’d love to meet him someday.”
The reason she got the CMA award is obvious: the industry people want her as their representative because she sells a lot of records, which they think means she can further country music’s popularity. I think they’re dead wrong. Country music has been around for a long, long time, and has done its own popularity building.
Country music is currently bigger than it’s ever been and still growing. What’s responsible for that?
Haggard: I think you can put it all down to the exposure country music’s gotten in the last ten years — which is more exposure than it’s ever had before. There’s also been a change of attitude about it. Not so many years ago, country music was looked down on, and you wouldn’t see well-dressed people admitting they liked it. But that’s changed now. I happen to think the desire for it has always been there, and I personally can’t see why anybody wouldn’t like country music. Myself, I like all music, and I think there’s only two kinds: good and bad, and nobody’s opinion on what’s good really counts except your own. If nothing else, that’s one thing the hippie uprising did for us all: it suggested that we do our own thing and be proud of it.
Praise for hippies is about the last thing we’d expect from the man who wrote and recorded the ultimate hippie put-down, “Okie from Muskogee.” Could it be that you’re a closet longhair?
Haggard: Hell, no. And I didn’t write “Okie from Muskogee” with the idea of gettin’ back at hippies. Me and the band were on a bus in Oklahoma when we passed a sign sayin’, “Muskogee, 100 miles” or something like that, and somebody said, “I bet they don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.” I thought that was a funny comment; so we started making up some more lines, and in about twenty minutes we had us a song.
Did you expect “Okie from Muskogee” to be the monster hit it turned out to be?
Haggard: Yeah, and I’ll tell you why. The night after we wrote it, we played a non-commissioned officers’ club at an air force base down in North Carolina, and I sang it there. At the end of the song, some sergeant came walking up to the stage and just completely stopped the show and asked if I’d sing it again. I said okay; so we did it again. And again. We left scratch in’ our heads, and I told everybody, “I think we might have somethin’ here, but this hasn’t been a fair trial, ’cause it’s a military base.”
The next night, though, we played a regular coliseum — and at the end of “Okie from Muskogee,” people climbed past the orchestra pit and up to the stage. We knew then that we had a product to record live, and I thought that it was a natural. Funny thing is, “Okie from Muskogee” turned out to be a very, very bad record. The musicianship on it, the singing — we just weren’t up to par.
Why not?
Haggard: It was our own danged fault. We were doing dates in Texas and the Southwest and trying to put together an album that was gonna be called Six Nights In A Row. We decided to do the recording ourselves. But instead of hiring a company that specializes in that sort of thing, we just took along the eight-track machine — out of a little ole dingbat studio we have in Bakersfield, Calif. — stuck it in a van, and headed off. As it turned out, we didn’t have a correct power supply. We were short three or four little things to make the equipment work right. We ran into all kinds of problems.
Anyway, we got down to the last night of the trip, which was also the most important night, ’cause we were playing in Muskogee, Okla. I remember walkin’ around sayin’, “We’re not going to make no record this trip,” for I was sure something new would go wrong with the recording gear that night. I wasn’t really mistaken, ‘cause the record’s full of technical sounds — poppin’, wires hissing, just about everything went slightly haywire. But in spite of all that, the damned record was the biggest thing we ever had.
Why do you think it became such a huge success?
Haggard: “Okie from Muskogee” said something to those particular people who were called “the silent majority.” Finally they were having something said in their behalf, and they really came unwound when they heard it said the way they wanted to hear it said. We got reactions like that for three or four years, and in some places we still get wild reactions.
Did you get much criticism about the song from the liberal press?
Haggard: I really figured that would happen, but it didn’t — at least, not very much. Oh, there were some jokes and some kidding, but nothing really hot. The song kicked up some controversy in both directions, but I don’t think it got any more attention than it had coming to it. The song was about something that was happening in this country, and the controversy was between the people and not really directed toward me or toward “Okie from Muskogee.”
Were you very down on the hippies?
Haggard: I sure was. During the uprising that started in 1968 and 1969, which is what the song was directed toward, those people had all the gripes and bitches and were going around sayin’, “Down with everything!” But they had no answers.
Soon after “Okie from Muskogee,” you recorded “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” a song that criticized war protesters and “warned” them: “If you don’t love it, leave it.” Do you really think that people who disagree with a nation’s war policy should either shut up about it or be subject to a love-it-or-leave-it ultimatum?
Haggard: No, I wasn’t saying that. I’ve never thought things are perfect in this country and that we should take it the way it is or leave it. The song said love it or leave it, which is something very different.
In what way?
Haggard: I think that if you don’t love this country, you damned sure can’t or won’t have tile initiative to really change it and help it; if you don’t love America, the only reason you’re gonna be here is to tear it down. For instance, if you’re raising a child and you hate that kid, how you gonna raise it right? So I think if you don’t love the country, you should leave it. And if you love it, then stay here and try to fix the sonofabitch.
“Nice girls’ parents wouldn’t let their daughters go out with me. I wasn’t a bad kid, just mischievous.”
Political dissidents would claim that’s precisely what they try to do. Do you automatically assume that people who’ve supported unpopular causes — such as the antiwar movement of the sixties — hate the nation?
Haggard: No, but I still think you’ve got to love the country enough to take the good with the bad, to put up with its problems, and to defend it when it needs defending. Look, we really have to take orders from the people in charge and to have confidence in their decisions. And if they make the wrong decisions, we’re the ones at fault, because we put ’em in office. People seem to be saying, “Okay; Iet’s argue and talk about what we should do, but Iet’s not fight each other. Lets not tear up any more schools or burn down any more buildings.” Stuff like that went on not too many years ago, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. It’s still going on, and now it’s really gettin’ dangerous — like the incident where some people blew up an airport terminal in New York several months ago.
Does that lead you to conclude that America will suffer from stepped-up guerrilla-style activity in the future?
Haggard: I hate to think so, but I believe that it’s probably inevitable and that it will happen here. As our country grows in population and as our standard of living keeps going down — which it has — we’re gonna be in for more and more trouble. Our economy seems to have peaked out in the late fifties, at a time when we were probably living better than any other society in modern history. But as we get an increase in people and as our food supply declines, there’s bound to be serious agitation. People get uncomfortable when they get hungry; if there’s a whole mess of folks starving to death and one ole boy has a bunch of food in his house, they’re gonna come around and tear down his door. And if they’re cold at night and another ole boy has all the heatin’ oil in town, they’re gonna take that too.
When do you see all this happening?
Haggard: Unless we find some new energy sources to replace the ones we’re using now — the cost of which is screwing up our entire economy — we’re gonna be in bad shape in fifteen years. We just can’t depend on oil for energy anymore — that’s what we’ve got to get away from. Coal is one of the main resources being talked about to replace oil with, but coal is one of the worst air polluters there is.
I know a lot of people who are studying all this, and they claim there’s a lot more oil around than we know about or have found yet. But that still may not mean too much. You see, there’s things like production and transportation costs to consider. How much will it really cost to get oil down here from Alaska, and by the time it gets here, how many more people will need how much ,more oil?
You sound very pessimistic about the future. Are you?
Haggard: No, ’cause I think that we’re going to find other sources of energy. If I’m wrong and we don’t, then we’re in for bad times. But I think we’ll learn how to use the sun and the oceans for producing energy. We’re on the verge of breaking through in both areas right now, or at least that’s what I’m told. Solar research is really coming along fast, and if we can harness the sun’s energy, it means we’ll have energy for as long as the sun comes up. And the day it don’t come up, well, we probably won’t need energy.
Do you think your interest in the energy issue will eventually cause you to write songs about it?
Haggard: Could be. But if I don’t, other people will — you almost always find a song in the country charts that gives you a picture or an explanation of a subject that’s on everybody’s mind. That’s why it’s fair to say that country music is journalism set to music. But that’s only part of what country music is.
What’s the rest?
Haggard: To me, it’s a way of life — and country music was my way of life before it became my profession. It’s hard to explain, but it begins with the difference between a country-music fan and a fan of some other kind of music. For a lot of people, music is something to create an atmosphere with or something to enjoy by yourself. Country-music fans are different, because they literally worship their idols, and they’re not satisfied just to play their records; they’ve got to get everybody else in the neighborhood listening, too. I was like that myself when I was a kid.
And who were the country musicians you used to tell people about?
Haggard: I liked the three guys who were big in 1950, which is when I was first jumping out of the nest: Hank Williams, Bob Wills — who was beginning to go down in popularity about that time — and Lefty Frizzell. They were the top country artists in America, and when any of them came to my hometown of Bakersfield, I’d get so damned excited that I’d act a little crazy. I was in high school the first time Frizzell ever came to Bakersfield, and it was such an event for me that I got drunk the night before his appearance and stayed drunk all that night and the next day, and wound up barely able to make it to the dance. He played at a place called the Rainbow Garden, and it was such a madhouse you could hardly hear him. Frizzell was a young, good-looking guy with a lot of class, and a fifteen-year-old, like I was, could really admire him. He also. turned out to be the first musician of any stature ever to get me up on the bandstand.
How did that come about?
Haggard: The second time Frizzell came through town was in 1953, and by then I’d gotten to playin’ guitar and singing; and my friends liked what I did so much that when we’d go to parties, I’d wind up havin’ to sing all night. Anyway, when Lefty came to play the Rainbow Garden again, my friends went backstage before the show and asked Frizzell if he’d like to meet a guy who sang like he did. He said sure; so I was allowed to go backstage and sing a couple of songs for him, and he seemed pretty pleased. Just as I finished up, one of the club owners came by and told Lefty it was time to start the show, and Frizzell said, “I want this kid to sing a song out there before I go on.” The owner looked at Lefty like he was crazy and told him, “Hey, that crowd didn’t pay to hear their own local yokel sing. They came to hear Frizzell.”
But Lefty refused to go on if I wasn’t allowed to sing; so he got his way, and I got to use his guitar and have his band play behind me. It was quite a thrill. I did two or three songs, and they were well accepted. Other than Frizzell’s songs, I only knew songs by Jimmie Rodgers, and I remember singing one of ’em, called “My Rough and Rowdy Ways.”
That may have been a particularly appropriate choice. How rough and rowdy were you as a kid?
Haggard: Well, if it means anything, nice girls’ parents wouldn’t let their daughters go out with me. I wasn’t a bad lid, just mischievous. My one big disagreement with life in those days was that I didn’t want to go to school. So I was always takin’ off with a good friend of mine, Dean Corlson, who’s always been in my band. We’d wind up work in’ some harvest and usually makin’ it rough on ourselves when we didn’t have to. Both of us were well taken care of at home, but we somehow would always end up on a trip somewhere, broke and hungry. It’s kind of fun to think about now, ’cause we had us some good times.
Such as?
Haggard: Well, one time we decided to go to Missouri; so Dean and I and another fella and a girl just up and left town in a ’41 Plymouth. The girl was fourteen, I was sixteen, and Dean and this other boy were both seventeen, and we didn’t think anything about it. But the law did. After we were gone one night, the girl’s folks got the police out lookin’ for us, and when we drove through a place called Ash Fork, Ariz., two police had us pull over and said, “Yup, these are the ones we got that all-points bulletin on.”
The Ash Fork, Ariz., law officers stopped us on Highway 66 and had us follow them to another highway, where they told us, “Listen, we’re the only officers on duty out here, and we can’t leave our posts. This is a two-way highway that goes to a town called Prescott, and there’s no roads off it in either direction. You kids drive into Prescott — police will be waiting for you at the city limits. Meanwhile we’re gonna wait right here until we get radioed that you’re in custody.”
That was our orders; so we left for Prescott, but we weren’t feelin’ too hot. The police had told us we were guilty of white slavery and that we’d be going to jail; so instead of driving to Prescott, we just turned off the highway and cut a path right through the damned desert — we drove a good twenty miles out into the sand. When we stopped, we covered that old Plymouth up with tumbleweeds and then just sat there for three days. By then we’d gone through all the beer, sandwiches, and candy we’d brought with us, and we were dyin’ of thirst and hunger. We’d held-out for as long as we could; so we decided to try to make it past the police roadblock in Prescott. We started toward that town at three in the morning; and as we got there, we saw the police roadblock, just past an alleyway. As luck would have it, the police officer on duty was talking to somebody and had his back to us. And before he could turn around to see our car, we ducked into the alley, went around the back of the building, and were able to get back on the highway. We drove straight home.
We didn’t know, of course, that the Arizona police had already radioed California authorities that they had us in custody. The Arizona police were probably a little annoyed about us slipping by ’em, because the day after we all got home the juvenile authorities picked us up on charges of white slavery and escape. I told ’em we didn’t escape from no one, ’cause Arizona never really had us. They just thought they had us. Me and Dean did a couple of weeks in the clink for that one. Something like that was always goin’ on.
Why do you think you got into so many scrapes with the law?
Haggard: I honestly think it began with my dislike for school. California has a strict truancy law, and the first time they came down on me for not going to school, I wound up being sent to a little ole road camp. I stayed in that place five days.
Did that short stretch teach you anything?
Haggard: Actually, my sentence was longer than five days. The reason I was able to leave is that I stole a car, which was the real begin’ning of my troubles with the law. After that, it was just one thing after another, a lot of it involved in trying to get away from someplace. I was still a kid when I got into trouble for writing hot checks in Phoenix, and then I took to running with some ex-cons and experienced thieves, and I pulled a few jobs with ’em. I ended up tryin’ to pull some jobs on my own, and I got caught. One night me and a few guys were drinkin’, and we decided to rob a cafe in Bakersfield. The law got us, and all of a sudden I was headed for San Quentin.
Were you frightened by the prospect of being sent to San Quentin?
Haggard: I sure was. My sentence was from six months to a fifteen-year top, and I remember bein’ real worried about going to the joint. San Quentin was a dreaded name. I’d already been sent to a couple of places for boys sixteen to eighteen years old, and they’d been pretty mean institutions. I recall thinking, “Goddamn, if San Quentin’s any rougher than those sonofa-bitches, Lord, what am I in for?” But San Quentin turned out different than I thought. If you had to be sent to prison in 1957, it was actually a good place to be, because you were allowed to do your time in peace, and you were treated like a man.
You once said, “I’m not sure it works like that often, but I’m one guy the prison system straightened out. I know damned well I’m a better man for it.” Why?
Haggard: For me, San Quentin was like the army would probably be for any other young man: I learned a lot of values there. I went to San Quentin when I was nineteen, and I just kind of grew up there. The joint’s changed in a lot of ways since then; but at the time there was a lot of respect and honesty to be found inside San Quentin. You’d tell a man you were going to do something, and it had best be done on that day, ’cause there’d be no place to hide. After you saw a few guys killed, you learned how important honesty is. It seems like life was cheap and honesty meant everything. Besides that, I realized that I had to grow up. So I made a choice to get out.
Was San Quentin as violent then as it is now?
Haggard: No, and that’s because the age spread of cons when I was there was something like eighteen to sixty. There were enough guys my own age to talk to, and there were enough older fellas to keep things settled down. The problem now is that San Quentin has a younger class of inmate. Most of ’em today are eighteen to thirty years old. The result of having all these young kids bunched up in one place is that San Quentin’s been sectioned off into black gangs, white gangs, and Mexican gangs. Whoever’s in charge of California’s correctional deal is making a big mistake, because if San Quentin had more thirty-five-and forty-year-old guys who could handle themselves and whose heads are on straight, that gang crap wouldn’t be allowed to go on.
Why not?
Haggard: Because old cons will run a joint, and they just want to do their time and be left alone. Young cons live in a dream world, and I’d say that about 80 percent of ’em are halfway proud of bein’ in San Quentin, which is why they walk around with a gung-ho, I’m-a-crook attitude. You don’t see that in a more mature penitentiary. Most older cons are damned sorry to be in prison.
How involved were you with music while you were in prison?
Haggard: For the first year I was there, not at all. They used to have five different classifications of custody: maximum custody, close custody, medium custody, medium B, and minimum. I was on close custody during my first year, because I’d run away from all those juvenile joints. In other words, I had an escape record. That meant I couldn’t get to play no music. But after a year, a friend of mine got my classification changed to medium custody, because they wanted me to play in the warden’s show. Every week we’d play for different organizations, like Moose Hall or police or firemen and their wives, or whoever else would come and visit the joint. It was actually a pretty good show, with everything from magicians and dancers to country singers.
Had you decided by then to earn your living as a musician?
Haggard: No, I had no hopes of it, but when I got out of San Quentin in 1960 — I served two years and nine months — I was like a lot of people: I had no idea how to get into music as a professional. So I went to work for my brother, who was an electrical contractor. And after a little while I got a job, playing four nights a week at a place called High Pockets, in Bakersfield. I finally went into music full time when I got a job for six nights a week in another club.
Right about then I met Fuzzy Owen, who had a little record and music-publishing company, and he became my manager. I was awfully naïve about business, and Fuzzy could’ve take me for whatever he wanted to, because I’d have believed anything he said. Luckily, Fuzzy turned out to be an honest guy, and we wound up workin’ together. Everything was goin’ along fine until 1961, when I went to Las Vegas and worked for a year at the Nashville Nevada Club.
What was the problem?
Haggard: I got into gambling. When I got to Las Vegas, I had me a new car and a few thousand dollars in the bank — and before I left, I’d lost everything. my game was “twenty-one”; that’s all I ever played, and I guess I shouldn’t have. But even though I had to go back to Bakersfield and start all over, my year in Las Vegas didn’t turn out all bad, because while I was there I cut my first record, “Sing Me a Sad Song,” which made the national and Billboard charts. When I got back to Bakersfield, I did a record for Fuzzy’s label, called “All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers,” and it got to be the number-two song on country charts throughout the nation. It also made Capitol Records sit up and take notice, and when they wanted to buy me from the small label Fuzzy owned, we both agreed that we’d better do it.
Most county music stars seem to live in or around Nashville. Is there and particular reason why you don’t?
Haggard: Yeah, there is. Since we were looking to get ahead in country music, it didn’t make sense to us to go where everybody else was. Instead of going to Nashville and getting’ lost in the shuffle, we though we’d get more notice by workin’ steady and stayin’ away. You gotta understand that country music isn’t like the movie business: to get into films, you pretty much have to go to Hollywood or do well on Broadway. But you can make a good record anywhere. Another thing that decided me against going was that I’ve never known of anyone becoming a star out of Nashville since it became the center of country music. A lot of country stars live there, but they don’t start there.
Is being a star different from what you imagined it might be like when you were a kid?
Haggard: Hell, yes. You fantasize that there’s the top of a mountain, but there ain’t none. I sure don’t know of people who’ve gotten to the top of the mountain, and if there is such a place, I bet they were so damned busy they didn’t know they were there. Some folks think I’m there.
Are you?
Haggard: Only in this sense: there’s eight or ten entertainers — not too many more — who can consistently draw audiences across the country, and I think I’m in that bracket’. But I can’t afford to get sick, and at times that’s a terrible weight. It’s a scary feeling to carry around, because there’s times I have been sick. But you’ve gotta go onstage, ’cause if you don’t, it won’t just end in a reprimand. You’re gonna get sued, and you’re gonna pay for it in months to come, ’cause when you come through that town again, people are gonna be bad-mouthin’ you.
What goes through your mind when you perform when you’re ill?
Haggard: I just get mad, mostly at myself for not puttin’ my foot down and sayin’ the hell with it and goin’ back to my room. It’s a strange life, believe me. We probably do 150 days on the road every year, even though we always start out with the intention of only doing eighty.
What effect does being on the road so much have on you?
Haggard: It makes me feel like a stranger when I go home. In fact, I don’t really feel like I have a home. I’ve been movin’ on down the road for twelve years now. My wife traveled with me for about ten years, and that finally became too much of a problem for her and the kids.
But when I go home, I sit around for two or three days. And then I get to feelin’ that you ought to be somewhere; so I go somewhere. I wouldn’t recommend this kind of life to anybody, and if there was any other way I could make the kind of money I do, I’d change my life in a minute. The money part of it is good, very good. But there’s a whole lot of things that go with it that sometimes makes me wonder if it’s worth it.
What would make it worth it?
Haggard: My big dream is to take a year off, and I want to do that before I get too old to enjoy some of the things I’ve accumulated, like a houseboat and a couple of other things I like to relax with. The trap is a financial one: I have to figure out a way to maintain the band and our organization while I lay around doin’ nothing. My real problem, I guess, is that I’m the type of guy who worries about tomorrow the day before yesterday, to the point where if I have to work on Tuesday, I won’t be able to enjoy going fishing on Monday. I guess the thing that upsets me most about all this is that I don’t know if I can change my ways. And if I don’t, that year will never come.
Obviously this interview happened nearly 50 years ago now, and Merle sadly left this plane in 2016 from pneumonia complications. He eventually made it to the very top of his profession, though, his achievemnts including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and even a Kennedy Center Honor. He made it to three different Halls of Fame, Oklahoma Music, Nashville Songwriters, and (of course) the County Music one. At least one of here remembers “Okie from Muskogee” blaring from the speakers on city-wide July 4th celebrations every year — and that was in Colorado. Any biography you can find on Merle will likely be fascinating, but honestly it would be hard to beat Ken Burns when it comes to that category. If we value individualism at all, one could fine few better examples.
