Merle Haggard, RIP

[danasgoodstuff]

https://www.google.com/search?q=merle+haggard&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=merle+haggard&tbm=nws

[danasgoodstuff]

[skeith]

Oh shit...he was fantastic!!!

[John L]

I was just thinking about him because of his birthday.   A great loss.   RIP

[soulpope]

Merle Haggard R.I.P

[duaneiac]

Wow -- i just read it was his birthday today in the notable birthdays column in the local newspaper.  He definitely made his own kind of music and lived life on his own terms.  There's probably even fewer genuine "living legends" left in the country music field now than there is in the jazz field.  May he Rest In Peace.

[A Lark Ascending]

Only knew his music in passing but this 'tribute' album of 20 odd years back is marvellous:

Might not be the real deal but made me realise what a good songwriter he was. 

[skeith]

On the other hand some of his best songs were written by others....but so many great songs.   I think his voice is underrated....everyone talks about the voice of George Jones which is fantastic...but not sure I like it any better than Merle's which is such a quintessential country voice.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

loved the shows i saw in 2005 when he opened for dylan, RIP

[jazztrain]

1 hour ago, chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez said:

loved the shows i saw in 2005 when he opened for dylan, RIP

I saw him open for Dylan as well in Boston.  That was the highlight of the night as it turned out.

[paul secor]

Merle Haggard was one of my favorite singers and songwriters, but to me he was much more than that. He was a man who was his own person (that's said of many, but is true of a lot fewer).

Merle Haggard had a love of history, especially musical history. At the height of his popularity, he recorded tribute albums to Bob Wills and Jimmy Rodgers, two of his heroes. (The Bob Wills album introduced me to Mr. Wills' music and to the Western Swing genre.) In 1973, when Bob Wills and a group of his former band members got together to record a last album - Mr. Wills was incapacitated by a stroke and was only able to sing a bit and not play, although his spirit was there and that last record is a good one - Merle Haggard was the only non-Texas Playboy who was a part of those sessions. When he recorded a live album in New Orleans, he did a song, "Big Bad Bill Is Sweet William Now", that the then mostly forgotten country/blues/minstrel singer Emmett Miller had recorded in the late 1920's, and stopped to do a short spoken tribute to Emmett Miller. The audience didn't seem to care much, but it was important to Merle Haggard and obvious that he did care. Later on, he released a tribute album to two more of his heroes. Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams - The Way It Was in '51 - "Hank and Lefty Crowded Every Juke Box". And toward the end of his career, he did a tribute album to Lefty Frizzell with Lefty Frizzell's original guitarist, Norman Stephens, who had been out of music for many years and was a retired civil engineer. Mr. Stephens had decided to get re-involved in music and a chance connection put him in contact with Merle Haggard. It turned out that their homes were only 20 miles apart. The result of that was Roots Volume 1, with a number of Lefty songs, a few written by Merle, and a couple each that had been recorded by Hank Williams and Hank Thompson - Norman Stephens had played with the latter, also. And Mr. Stephens could still play some fine guitar.

Merle Haggard was a wonderful heartfelt singer and wrote a slew of great songs over the years. He's probably best known - at least by people who don't know much about his career - for "Okie From Muskogee", which became a kind of redneck anthem of its time. What most people don't know is that, shortly thereafter, he recorded a song entitled "Irma Jackson", about an interracial love affair. It wasn't released at the time, supposedly because of pressure from his record company, but it was released a few years later on an album, Let Me Tell You About a Song. Merle introduced it by saying that it wasn't released at the time it was recorded and, "Of all the songs that I've written, this may be my favorite, because it tells it like it is."

Merle Haggard was a man who couldn't be pigeonholed and not a man who did things neatly. I recall seeing a television broadcast where he and his band were playing a concert at the Ronald Reagan ranch. Ron and Nancy were in the front row and at one point Merle did a song called "Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver)", which recounts some of the changes in post WW II American life. He sang the lines, "Before microwave ovens/ when a girl could still cook and still would", and Ron and Nancy were smiling. They didn't know the whole song, however, and when Merle sang. "Back before Nixon lied to us all on TV", those smiles turned to frowns.

It would be impossible to pick one song that summed up Merle Haggard, but the one that comes closest for me is "My Own Kind of Hat" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2FeT9by2FA . It's not p.c., but then neither was Merle. And it's true and so was Merle.

Before everything else, Merle Haggard was a singer, songwriter, and musician. He was a musician in the sense that he had a crack band. The Strangers, backing him, built on the foundations of the great guitarist Roy Nichols - until illness forced him to stop playing - steel guitarist Norm Hamlett, and for many years, drummer Biff Adams.

As a songwriter, he was up among the best. I won't list all of my favorite Merle songs, but "Everybody's Had the Blues", "Someday We'll Look Back", "If We Make It Through December", "I Forget You Every Day", "Leonard" - his bittersweet and funny tribute to his good friend, the songwriter and singer, Tommy Collins - and the aforementioned "My Own Kind of Hat" are just a few.

Merle knew great songs written by others too, and he recorded them, in addition to his own. I think of "I'm a Lonesome Fugitive", written by Liz and Casey Anderson, which became one of Merle's theme songs (I never knew until recently that the line "He who travels fastest goes alone, was adapted from Kipling); "One Row at a Time", written by Red Lane and Dottie West, which sounds as if it could have been written by Merle; and Tommy Collins' "The Man Who Picked the Wildwood Flower".

As a singer, I'll steal something that Bob Dylan supposedly said: Not every great poet is a great singer, but every great singer is a great poet. When Merle Haggard sang, he was a great poet.

I could say much more, but I've already said too much.

So - thank you, Mr. Haggard. You'll be missed and remembered.

 

 

 

Edited April 8, 2016 by paul secor

[HutchFan]

That's a lovely remembrance, paul.

[Stereojack]

7 hours ago, HutchFan said:

That's a lovely remembrance, paul.

In full agreement, from one Merle fan to another.