Haggard’s property is several miles off the highway, at the end of a curving blacktop that passes ranch-style houses with ornate gates and horses grazing under giant oak trees.
The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time: Merle Haggard I’m sorta glad he didn’t do it, though, because then he’d be on the oldies circuit singing his rock & roll hits instead of becoming the Merle Haggard we all know and love.” If Merle had been around Sun Studio in Memphis in the Fifties, Sam Phillips would have turned him into a rock & roll star, one of the best. He definitely transcends the country genre. “ Merle Haggard has always been as deep as deep gets,” says Bob Dylan. Haggard’s songs look on his early life with a mixture of pride and regret, and they are sung in a warm, rangy baritone, strong but hinting at a deeper vulnerability, with little of the cornball sentimentality that characterized much 1960s country. “I would’ve become a lifetime criminal if music hadn’t saved my ass.” He spent nearly half of his first 21 years “running away or behind bars,” he says. “ Johnny Cash once told me, ‘Hag, you’re the guy people think I am,'” Haggard says. Mostly, though, Haggard’s early songs narrate the difficult circumstances of his own life: The son of Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma to the San Joaquin Valley, Haggard lost his father at age nine, hopped his first train a year later, and spent his teenage years in and out of juvenile institutions, military schools and, eventually, San Quentin. Haggard’s early hits – “The Fugitive,” “Branded Man,” “Mama Tried,” “Hungry Eyes,” “Workin’ Man Blues,” “Okie From Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home” – form the backbone of one of the greatest repertoires in all of American music, plain-spoken songs populated by the kinds of working people Haggard grew up with: farmers, hobos, convicts, widows, musicians and drunks. He was 43 years old, twice divorced and 14 years into an amazing streak of 26 Number One country singles, with another dozen to come in the next decade. “Residents,” he says finally, as they disappear into the trees. He watches them silently, his head cocked in concentration. As he smokes, two fawns wander by, not intimidated by our presence. Haggard fishes a plastic M&M container of weed from the pocket of his camouflage shirt, shrinks low on the seat and lights a black glass pipe. “I need to keep my hands tender,” he says. I ask Haggard if he takes part in the work. I think that’s a necessary project for me right now.” Below us, workers haul lumber and pour concrete at construction sites. “But I’d like to build me a home with some sanity, where it’s totally green.
“I’ve lived in houseboats and motor homes and band houses and cabins,” he says. Just below the crest of the hill, Haggard pulls into a clearing where he’s thinking about building a new house – a place the 72-year-old country singer would like to pass on to his family after he’s gone. How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopic
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Haggard, coughing frequently and speaking with a low, syrupy twang, points out that the grass looks soft but is actually razor-sharp and full of rattlesnakes, some as big around as his calf – better than any fence to keep out trespassers. The hillside is covered in waist-high yellow grass and twisted manzanita. On a perfect summer evening, as the electric-blue sky fades to glowing orange, Haggard’s golf cart strains and lurches up a steep incline on the north perimeter of his property. He’ll check on projects that are always under way but never seem to get finished – the mending of a fence in his sheep pen planting redwood trees the construction of a waterfall – or he might park on a wooden bridge that crosses the lake where he fishes for bass and catfish, and smoke some weed. Some afternoons, when his kids aren’t around and he doesn’t feel like practicing with his band, Merle Haggard will load a pipe, climb onto his John Deere golf cart and take a ride around his property, 200 acres of rugged California ranch land at the northern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.
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