Early career Upon his release from San Quentin in 1960, Haggard began digging ditches for his brother's electrical contracting company. Soon, he was performing again and later began recording with Tally Records. The
Bakersfield sound was developing in the area as a reaction against the overproduced
Nashville sound. Haggard's first record for Tally was "Singing My Heart Out" backed by "Skid Row"; it was not a success, and only 200 copies were pressed. In 1962, Haggard wound up performing at a
Wynn Stewart show in
Las Vegas and heard Wynn's "Sing a Sad Song". He asked for permission to record it, and the resulting single was a national hit in 1964. The following year, he had his first national top-10 record with "
(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers", written by
Liz Anderson, mother of country singer
Lynn Anderson, and his career was off and running. Haggard recalls having been talked into visiting Anderson—a woman he did not know—at her house to hear her sing some songs she had written. "If there was anything I didn't wanna do, it was sit around some danged woman's house and listen to her cute little songs. But I went anyway. She was a pleasant enough lady, pretty, with a nice smile, but I was all set to be bored to death, even more so when she got out a whole bunch of songs and went over to an old pump organ... There they were. My God, one hit right after another. There must have been four or five number one songs there..." In 1967, Haggard recorded "
I'm a Lonesome Fugitive" with
the Strangers, also written by Liz Anderson, with her husband Casey Anderson, which became his first number-one single. When the Andersons presented the song to Haggard, they were unaware of his prison stretch.
Bonnie Owens, Haggard's backup singer and then-wife, is quoted by music journalist Daniel Cooper in the liner notes to the 1994 retrospective
Down Every Road: "I guess I didn't realize how much the experience at San Quentin did to him, 'cause he never talked about it all that much ... I could tell he was in a dark mood ... and I said, 'Is everything okay?' And he said, 'I'm really scared.' And I said, 'Why?' And he said, 'Cause I'm afraid someday I'm gonna be out there ... and there's gonna be ... some prisoner ... in there the same time I was in, stand up—and they're gonna be about the third row down—and say, 'What do you think you're doing, 45200?'" Cooper notes that the news had little effect on Haggard's career: "It's unclear when or where Merle first acknowledged to the public that his prison songs were rooted in personal history, for to his credit, he doesn't seem to have made some big splash announcement. In a May 1967 profile in
Music City News, his prison record is never mentioned, but in July 1968, in the very same publication, it's spoken of as if it were common knowledge." The 1967 album
Branded Man with
the Strangers kicked off an artistically and commercially successful run for Haggard. In 2013, Haggard biographer David Cantwell stated, "The immediate successors to ''I'm a Lonesome Fugitive
—Branded Man'' in 1967 and, in '68,
Sing Me Back Home and
The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde—were among the finest albums of their respective years." Haggard's new recordings showcased his band the Strangers, specifically
Roy Nichols's
Telecaster,
Ralph Mooney's
steel guitar, and the harmony vocals provided by
Bonnie Owens. At the time of Haggard's first top-10 hit "
(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers" in 1965, Owens, who had been married to
Buck Owens, was known as a solo performer, a fixture on the
Bakersfield club scene and someone who had appeared on television. She won the new
Academy of Country Music's first ever award for Female Vocalist after her 1965 debut album, ''Don't Take Advantage of Me'', hit the top five on the country albums chart. However, Bonnie Owens had no further hit singles, and although she recorded six solo albums on Capitol between 1965 and 1970, she became mainly known for her background harmonies on Haggard hits such as "
Sing Me Back Home" and "Branded Man". Producer Ken Nelson took a hands-off approach to produce Haggard. In the episode of
American Masters dedicated to him, Haggard remembers: "The producer I had at that time, Ken Nelson, was an exception to the rule. He called me 'Mr. Haggard' and I was a little twenty-four, twenty-five-year-old punk from Oildale... He gave me complete responsibility. I think if he'd jumped in and said, 'Oh, you can't do that', it would've destroyed me." In the documentary series
Lost Highway, Nelson recalls, "When I first started recording Merle, I became so enamored with his singing that I would forget what else was going on, and I suddenly realized, 'Wait a minute, there's musicians here you've got to worry about!' But his songs—he was a great writer." Towards the end of the decade, Haggard composed several number-one hits, including "
Mama Tried", "The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde", "Hungry Eyes", and "Sing Me Back Home". Daniel Cooper calls "Sing Me Back Home" "a ballad that works on so many different levels of the soul it defies one's every attempt to analyze it".
"Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me" In 1969, Haggard and the Strangers released "
Okie From Muskogee", with lyrics ostensibly reflecting the singer's pride in being from
Middle America, where people are conventionally patriotic and traditionally conservative. American president
Richard Nixon wrote an appreciative letter to Haggard upon his hearing of the song, and would go on to invite Haggard to perform at the White House several times. In the ensuing years, Haggard gave varying statements regarding whether he intended the song as a humorous satire or a serious political statement in support of conservative values. In a 2001 interview, Haggard called the song a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time". However, he made several other statements suggesting that he meant the song seriously. On the
Bob Edwards Show, he said, "I wrote it when I recently got out of the joint. I knew what it was like to lose my freedom, and I was getting really mad at these protesters. They didn't know anything more about the war in Vietnam than I did. I thought how my dad, who was from Oklahoma, would have felt. I felt I knew how those boys fighting in Vietnam felt." In the country music documentary series
Lost Highway, he elaborated: "My dad passed away when I was nine, and I don't know if you've ever thought about somebody you've lost and you say, 'I wonder what so-and-so would think about this?' I was drivin' on
Interstate 40 and I saw a sign that said '19 Miles to Muskogee', while at the same time listening to radio shows of
The World Tomorrow hosted by
Garner Ted Armstrong. Muskogee was always referred to in my childhood as 'back home.' So I saw that sign and my whole childhood flashed before my eyes and I thought, 'I wonder what dad would think about the youthful uprising that was occurring at the time, the
Janis Joplins... I understood 'em, I got along with it, but what if he was to come alive at this moment? And I thought, what a way to describe the kind of people in America that are still sittin' in the center of the country sayin', 'What is goin' on on these campuses?'", as it was the subject of this Garner Ted Armstrong radio program. "And a week or so later, I was listening to Garner Ted Armstrong, and Armstrong was saying how the smaller colleges in smaller towns don't seem to have any problems. And I wondered if Muskogee had a college, and it did, and they hadn't had any trouble - no racial problems and no dope problems. The whole thing hit me in two minutes, and I did one line after another and got the whole thing done in 20 minutes." In the
American Masters documentary about him, he said, "That's how I got into it with the hippies... I thought they were unqualified to judge America, and I thought they were lookin' down their noses at something that I cherished very much, and it pissed me off. And I thought, 'You sons of bitches, you've never been restricted away from this great, wonderful country, and yet here you are in the streets bitchin' about things, protesting about a war that they didn't know any more about than I did. They weren't over there fightin' that war any more than I was." On his next single, "
The Fightin' Side of Me", released by his record company in 1970 over Haggard's objections, Haggard's lyrics stated that he did not mind the counterculture "switchin' sides and standin' up for what they believe in", but resolutely declared, "If you don't love it, leave it!" In May 1970, Haggard explained to John Grissom of
Rolling Stone, "I don't like their views on life, their filth, their visible self-disrespect, y'know. They don't give a shit what they look like or what they smell like... What do they have to offer humanity?" In a 2003 interview with
No Depression magazine, Haggard said, "I had different views in the '70s. As a human being, I've learned [more]. I have more culture now. I was dumb as a rock when I wrote 'Okie From Muskogee'. That's being honest with you at the moment, and a lot of things that I said [then] I sing with a different intention now. My views on marijuana have totally changed. I think we were brainwashed and I think anybody that doesn't know that needs to get up and read and look around, get their own information. It's a cooperative government project to make us think marijuana should be outlawed." Haggard had wanted to follow "Okie from Muskogee" with "
Irma Jackson", a song that dealt with an interracial romance between a white man and an African American woman. His producer,
Ken Nelson, discouraged him from releasing it as a single. After "The Fightin' Side of Me" was released instead, Haggard later commented to
The Wall Street Journal, "People are narrow-minded. Down South they might have called me a nigger lover." In a 2001 interview, Haggard stated that Nelson, who was also head of the country division at Capitol at the time, never interfered with his music, but "this one time he came out and said, 'Merle, I don't believe the world is ready for this yet.' ... And he might have been right. I might've canceled out where I was headed in my career." Although
Gordon Friesen of
Broadside magazine criticized Haggard for his "John Birch Society|[John] Birch–type songs against war dissenters", Haggard was popular with college students in the early 1970s, not only because of the ironic use of his songs by
counterculture members, but also because his music was recognized as coming from an early country-folk tradition. Both "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me" received extensive airplay on underground radio stations, and "Okie" was performed in concert by
protest singers
Arlo Guthrie and
Phil Ochs. He also wrote and performed the theme song to the television series ''
Movin' On'', which in 1975 gave him and the Strangers another
number-one country hit. During the early-to-mid-1970s, Haggard and the Strangers country chart domination continued with songs such as "Someday We'll Look Back", "
Grandma Harp", "
Always Wanting You", and "
The Roots of My Raising". Between 1973 and 1976, he and the Strangers scored nine consecutive number-one country hits. Haggard appeared in an episode of
The Waltons titled "The Comeback", season five, episode three, original air-date October 10, 1976. He played a bandleader named Red, who had been depressed since the death of his son (Ron Howard). In 1977, he switched to
MCA Records and began exploring the themes of depression, alcoholism, and middle age on albums such as
Serving 190 Proof and
The Way I Am. Haggard sang a duet cover of
Billy Burnette's "What's A Little Love Between Friends" with
Lynda Carter in her 1980 television music special,
Lynda Carter: Encore! In 1980, Haggard headlined the
Bronco Billy soundtrack alongside
Ronnie Milsap, which saw Haggard score a number-one hit with "
Bar Room Buddies", a duet with actor
Clint Eastwood. In 1981, Haggard published an autobiography,
Sing Me Back Home. The same year, he provided the narration and theme for the movie
The Legend of the Lone Ranger. The movie did not perform as well as expected attributing its commercial failure to the Wrather/Moore dispute which generated negative publicity. Haggard also changed record labels again in 1981, moving to Epic and releasing one of his most critically acclaimed albums,
Big City, on which he was backed by the Strangers. Between 1981 and 1985, Haggard scored 12 more top-10 country hits, with nine of them reaching number one, including "My Favorite Memory", "Going Where the Lonely Go", "Someday When Things Are Good", and "Natural High". In addition, Haggard recorded two chart-topping duets with
George Jones—"Yesterdays' Wine" in 1982—and with
Willie Nelson—"Pancho and Lefty" in 1983. Nelson believed the 1983
Academy Award-winning film
Tender Mercies, about the life of fictional singer Mac Sledge, was based on the life of Merle Haggard. Actor
Robert Duvall and other filmmakers denied this and claimed the character was based on nobody in particular. Duvall, however, said he was a big fan of Haggard's. In 1983, Haggard and his third wife Leona Williams divorced after five stormy years of marriage. The split served as a license to party for Haggard, who spent much of the next decade becoming mired in alcohol and drug problems. In 1989, Haggard recorded a song, "Me and Crippled Soldiers Give a Damn", in response to the
Supreme Court's decision not to allow banning flag burning, considering it to be "speech" and therefore protected under the
First Amendment. After CBS Records Nashville avoided releasing the song, Haggard bought his way out of the contract and signed with
Curb Records, which was willing to release the song. Haggard commented about the situation, "I've never been a guy that can do what people told me... It's always been my nature to fight the system."
Comeback In 2000, Haggard made a comeback of sorts, signing with the independent record label Anti and releasing the spare
If I Could Only Fly to critical acclaim. He followed it in 2001 with
Roots, vol. 1, a collection of
Lefty Frizzell,
Hank Williams, and
Hank Thompson covers, along with three Haggard originals. The album, recorded in Haggard's living room with no overdubs, featured Haggard's longtime bandmates, the Strangers, as well as Frizzell's original lead guitarist, Norman Stephens. In December 2004, Haggard spoke at length on
Larry King Live about his incarceration as a young man and said it was "hell" and "the scariest experience of my life". When political opponents were attacking
the Chicks for criticizing President
George W. Bush's
2003 invasion of Iraq, Haggard spoke up for the band on July 25, 2003, saying: Haggard and the Strangers' number-one hit single "Mama Tried" is featured in Bryan Bertino's
The Strangers with Liv Tyler. In addition, his and the Strangers song "Swingin' Doors" can be heard in the film
Crash (2004), and his 1981 hit "
Big City", where he is backed by the Strangers, is heard in Joel and Ethan Coen's film
Fargo. In October 2005, Haggard released his album
Chicago Wind to mostly positive reviews. The album contains an anti-
Iraq War song titled "America First", in which he laments the nation's economy and faltering infrastructure, applauds its soldiers, and sings, "Let's get out of Iraq, and get back on track." This follows from his 2003 release "Haggard Like Never Before" in which he includes a song, "That's the News". Haggard released a
bluegrass album,
The Bluegrass Sessions, on October 2, 2007. In April 2010, Haggard released a new album,
I Am What I Am, to strong reviews, and he performed the title song on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in February 2011. Haggard's final concert was held in Oakland at the Paramount Theatre on February 13, 2016.
Collaborations Haggard collaborated with many other artists over the course of his career. In the early 1960s, Haggard recorded duets with Bonnie Owens, who later became his wife, for Tally Records, scoring a minor hit with "Just Between the Two of Us". As part of the deal that got Haggard signed to Capitol, producer
Ken Nelson obtained the rights to Haggard's Tally sides, including the duets with Owens, resulting in the release of Haggard's first duet album with Owens and the Strangers in 1966, also entitled
Just Between the Two of Us. The album reached number four on the country charts, and Haggard and Owens recorded a number of additional duets before their divorce in 1978. Haggard went on to record duets with George Jones, Willie Nelson, and Clint Eastwood, among others. In 1970, Haggard released
A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills), rounding up six of the remaining members of the Texas Playboys to record the tribute: Johnnie Lee Wills, Eldon Shamblin, Tiny Moore, Joe Holley, Johnny Gimble, and Alex Brashear. Haggard's band, the Strangers, were also present during the recording, but Wills suffered a massive stroke after the first day of recording. Haggard arrived on the second day, devastated that he would not get to record with him, but the album helped return Wills to public consciousness, and set off a Western swing revival. Haggard did other tribute albums to Bob Wills over the next 40 years. In 1973 he appeared on
For the Last Time: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. In 1994, Haggard collaborated with
Asleep at the Wheel and many other artists influenced by the music of Bob Wills on an album titled
A Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.
A Tribute was re-released on CD on the Koch label in 1995. In 1972, Haggard agreed to produce
Gram Parsons's first solo album but backed out at the last minute.
Warner Bros. arranged a meeting at Haggard's Bakersfield home and the two musicians seemed to hit it off, but later on the afternoon of the first session, Haggard canceled. Parsons, an enormous Haggard fan, was crushed, with his wife Gretchen telling Meyer, "Merle not producing Gram was probably one of the greatest disappointments in Gram's life. Merle was very nice, very sweet, but he had his own enemies and his own demons." In 1980, Haggard said of Parsons, in an interview with Mark Rose, "He was a pussy. Hell, he was just a long-haired kid. I thought he was a good writer. He was not wild, though. That's what's funny to me. All these guys running around in long hair talking about being wild and
Rolling Stones. I don't think someone abusing themselves on drugs determines how wild they are. It might determine how ignorant they are." In 2006, the pair released a sequel, ''
Kickin' Out the Footlights...Again''. Haggard released the duet album
Pancho & Lefty with
Willie Nelson in 1983, with the title track becoming an enormous hit for the duo. In 1987, a second, less successful LP,
Seashores of Old Mexico, was also released, and the pair worked together again with
Ray Price in 2007, releasing the album
Last of the Breed. In 2015, they released their sixth and final duet album,
Django and Jimmie. The album's lead single, "
It's All Going to Pot", was a subtle reference to smoking marijuana, and the music video for the song showed Haggard and Nelson smoking joints while singing in a recording studio. In 1983, Haggard got permission from Epic Records to collaborate with then-wife
Leona Williams on
Polydor Records, releasing
Heart to Heart in 1983. The album, on which they were backed by the Strangers, was not a hit, peaking at number 44. In 2001, Haggard released an album of gospel songs with
Albert E. Brumley called
Two Old Friends. In 2002, Haggard collaborated with longtime friend and fellow recording artist
Chester Smith (founder of television broadcasting company
Sainte Partners II, L.P. and owner of several stations in California and Oregon) with a CD titled
California Blend. The CD features classic country, western, and gospel tracks performed by both Smith and Haggard. In 2005, Haggard was featured as a guest vocalist on
Gretchen Wilson's song "Politically Uncorrect", which earned a
Grammy nomination for
Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. He is also featured singing a verse on
Eric Church's 2006 song "Pledge Allegiance to the Hag".That same year, Haggard was featured as a guest vocalist on
Blaine Larsen's song "If Merle Would Sing My Song". In 2010, Haggard was featured along with
Ralph Nader,
Willie Nelson,
Gatewood Galbraith and
Julia Butterfly Hill in the documentary film
Hempsters: Plant the Seed directed by Michael P. Henning. In 2015, Haggard was featured as a guest vocalist on
Don Henley's song "The Cost of Living" on the album
Cass County. Henley would later say he was "nervous", but "happily surprised" that Haggard joined him on the track. In 2017, Haggard appeared alongside
Willie Nelson in the award-winning documentary
The American Epic Sessions directed by
Bernard MacMahon. They performed a song Haggard had composed for the film, "The Only Man Wilder Than Me" and
Bob Wills' classic "Old Fashioned Love", which they recorded live on the restored first
electrical sound recording system from the 1920s. It was the last filmed performance of the pair, with
Rolling Stone commenting "in the final performance of Sessions, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard perform the duet "The Only Man Wilder Than Me". Haggard has a look of complete joy on his face throughout the session in the old-timey recording set-up once used by his musical heroes." Haggard's last recording, a song called "Kern River Blues", described his departure from Bakersfield in the late 1970s and his displeasure with politicians. The song was recorded February 9, 2016, and features his son Ben on guitar. This record was released on May 12, 2016. ==Equipment==