Okie from Muskogee - Merle Haggard | Song Info | AllMusic Okie from Muskogee google+ Song Review by Bill Janovitz "It started as a joke but it only took three seconds before we realized the importance of it," Merle Haggard has noted of the redneck anthem "Okie From Muskogee." Apparently Haggard and his band, the Strangers, started goofing around on the tour bus after passing through Muskogee, OK, the state from which Haggard's ancestors migrated -- along with thousands of like-minded neighbors -- to the Bakersfield, CA, area during the Great Depression.

Haggard and drummer Roy Burris started riffing, trading lines: "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don't make a party out of loving/But we like holding hands and pitching woo/We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy/Like the hippies out in San Francisco do." The writing process began by mocking the place, satirizing small-town America's reaction to the cultural and political upheaval of the late '60s, with Haggard all the while convincingly giving voice to a proud, straight-laced truck-driver type. The kicker is, Haggard has it both ways; in the end, he identifies with the narrator. He does not position the protagonist as angry, reactionary, or judgmental; it is more that the guy, a self-confessed "square," is confused by such changes and with a chuckle comes to the conclusion that he and his ilk have the right sort of life for themselves.

He takes a more live-and-let-live tone, while he holds on tightly to the values with which he was raised, thank you very much: "We still wave Old Glory down at the court house/In Muskogee Oklahoma U.S.A." As a result of this ambiguously patriotic sentiment, the mainstream country music audience identified with and embraced the single, sending it to number one on the country charts and just missing the Top 40 (it was later made available on the 1969 ad-hoc LP Okie From Muskogee). This ambiguity seems to not be the design of some cynical ironist; Haggard, with his Okie heritage colliding with his position as a thinking artist, was clearly as torn as many were during the tumultuous time -- with a loyalty to the old values of God and country, but confused by the rapid changes and an ongoing conflict in Vietnam. "There's something special about Oklahoma," noted Haggard. "My family was from Oklahoma but migrated to California during the Dust Bowl days. So, I guess I was a transplanted Okie.

Just like godfather to a child, Oklahoma is a 'godstate' to me." Because of the song's resonance with conservatives, Haggard was asked, but refused to endorse politician George Wallace. Haggard reflected on the song's political context in an interview with the satirical paper the Onion, "Oh, I must have been an idiot. It's documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time, and I mirror that. I always have. Staying in touch with the working class...but it's pretty easy to lie to me. You could lie to me. They had me in a film called Wag the Dog because of "Okie From Muskogee" and my close scrutiny of the people that are being shitted. I've become self-educated since I wrote that song.

But it still has a very timely description." Haggard seems to have run with the success and the more literal interpretation of the song, going on to record the patriotic (if not outrightly jingoistic) song "The Fighting Side of Me." In the context of a diverging cultural gap, it seems like the singer/songwriter felt he had to choose either to continue to appeal to his bread-and-butter audience -- the conservative working class -- or its antithesis, what is now referred to as the cultural elite. It was a defense mechanism, with Haggard standing up for the people of the heartland and the values they felt were being undermined: "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee." Other, hippie-identified artists like the Grateful Dead and James Taylor, however, picked up the song as part of their early-'70s live repertoire, performing it tongue-in-cheek, embracing it as satire. Musically it is a catchy, even pretty country song, with a singalong chorus, a hummable melody, and an uplifting modulation in key.

The Strangers provide ample support, with warm, strumming acoustic guitars interwoven with folky-picked acoustic and electric licks and arpeggios. Appears On Okie From Muskogee - YouTube Okie From Muskogee Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on Jan 10, 2010 Buck Billo and Maxi sing "Okie From Muskogee" by Merle Haggard. "Okie from Muskogee" is an American country music song performed by its co-writer, Merle Haggard. Released in 1969, the song became one of the most famous of his career.

"It started as a joke but it only took three seconds before we realized the importance of it," Haggard once noted about "Okie from Muskogee."[ In fact, critic Kurt Wolff wrote that Haggard always considered what became a redneck anthem to be a spoof, and that today fans - even the hippies that are derided in the lyrics - have taken a liking to the song and take humor in some of the lyrics. Written by Haggard and Roy Edward Burris (drummer for Haggard's backing band, The Strangers) during the height of the Vietnam War, "Okie from Muskogee" grew from the two trading one-liners about small-town life,[3] where conservative values were the norm and outsiders with ideals contrary to those ways were unwelcome.

Here, the singer reflects on how proud he is to hail from Middle America, where its residents were patriotic, didn't smoke marijuana, wear beads and sandals, burn draft cards or challenge authority.[4] While viewed as a satire of small-town America and its reaction to the anti-war protests and counterculture seen in America's larger cities, All Music Guide writer Bill Janovitz writes that the song also "convincingly (gives) voice to a proud, straight-laced truck-driver type. ... (I)n the end, he identifies with the narrator. He does not position the protagonist as angry, reactionary, or judgmental; it is more that the guy, a self-confessed 'square,' is confused by such changes and with a chuckle comes to the conclusion that he and his ilk have the right sort of life for themselves." "Asshole from El Paso" is a parody of "Okie", by Chinga Chavin, and famously covered by Kinky Friedman. "Okie from Muskogee" immediately broke in popularity when released in late September 1969. By November 15, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles chart, where it remained for four weeks.

It also became a minor pop hit as well, falling just short of the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The version of "Okie from Muskogee" that reached No. 1 was the studio recording. After the song became widely popular, a live concert recording was issued and although that version never charted, it became very popular as well. The live version's distinguishing characteristics include a raucous crowd clapping and singing along with the chorus, and a voice yelling out, "Tell it like it is!" after the first verse. "Okie from Muskogee" — along with the album, Okie from Muskogee — was named the Country Music Association Single of the Year in 1970.

From WikiPedia Category Why 'Okie From Muskogee' Was Merle Haggard's Contradictory Masterpiece - Rolling Stone Why 'Okie From Muskogee' Was Merle Haggard's Contradictory Masterpiece Why 'Okie From Muskogee' Was Merle Haggard's Contradictory Masterpiece The politically-charged song codified country music's us-against-them stance Why 'Okie From Muskogee' Was Merle Haggard's Contradictory Masterpiece It would be churlish, especially in the wake of his passing, to suggest Merle Haggard helped to envision and enable the combative, disaffected constituency that Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign has so rudely exploited. But it wouldn't be entirely untrue. More News PHOTOS: Merle Haggard: 30 Essential Songs From the defiance of "The Fightin' Side of Me" to the melancholy of "If We Make It Through December" However, Mr. Trump is no Merle Haggard and his message diverges severely — even at the working class poet's Vietnam-era, hippie-baitin', fightin'-side feistiest.

Plus, Hag was a Hillary Clinton supporter, dating back to 2007. He even wrote a song for her, proclaiming, "Let's put a woman in charge." He also wrote an inaugural song for Barack Obama called "Hopes Are High," though he later became disenchanted with Obama's economic policy. And he loved Ronald Reagan, partially because the then-California governed expunged his youthful criminal record in 1972. All of which is to say that you could keel over from vertigo trying to push-pin Haggard's ideology, mainly because he didn't have one. As he zig-zagged through life, his songs consistently expressed contradictory points of view — pride, shame, empathy, bitterness — both because his thinking evolved and he didn't care about tidy resolutions. Restless in every way, his music swerved from left to right to high as a kite to lost and broken. In the poignantly rendered "Sing Me Back Home," Haggard takes the last request of a man on his way to the gas chamber and makes us all feel diminished.

Over the course of two years, Haggard released two songs — the 1969 pop-crossover "Okie From Muskogee," a wiseass protest smackdown of anti-war protestors and 1970's joyous bully-boy romp "The Fightin' Side of Me" — that would both bless and curse his career. Though "Okie" made him rich and famous and turned Richard Nixon into his Number One fanboy, Haggard was no "Okie," a slur tossed at poor Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s. He was channeling his dad, who migrated from Oklahoma to the hardscrabble town of Oildale outside Bakersfield, California. At times, Haggard claimed the song was a satire of the salty point of view that had taken hold amongst his father's generation, men and women who had desperately chased after jobs to survive and resented what they saw as layabout, whiny, stoned hippies.

And with its jokey, sloganeering, sing-along lyrics, it sounds like it might've been cobbled together on the bus by a handful of musicians after many beers (which is how Haggard has implied it was written; drummer Roy Edward Burris does get a songwriting credit). Like the so-called gangsta rappers who came long after him, Hag contended that he was simply playing a provocative character. And like Ice-T and Ice Cube and 2Pac, he became a villain and cause célèbre for his militantly stylized portrayal. For his audiences, "Okie" was the love-it-or-leave-it, true-blue screw-you anthem they never could've imagined. At least in pop culture, it awakened what become known as "the Silent Majority," and codified country music's us-against-them stance. The song became yet another symbol of the post-Civil Rights struggle, as whites were pitted against blacks and college-educated lefty youth by bewildered, hidebound federal officials seeking to consolidate power and find scapegoats for the country's economic and wartime troubles.

In the Sixties and Seventies, politicians like Nixon and George Wallace followed the lead of the 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat Party (helmed by Strom Thurmond) and developed the "Southern Strategy," exploiting poor and working-class whites' very real belief that they were unheard and ignored. Instead of jobs or a shared sense of purpose or self-respect, they got racist, fear-mongering, faux-patriotic rhetoric. Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" hit at the perfect time to reflect this pitched unease. Haggard told the author RJ Smith in 2000: "I don't feel now the way I did when I wrote 'Okie from Muskogee.' I still sing it because it describes a period of time. I write from common knowledge, current knowledge, collective intelligence. At the time I wrote that song, I was just about as intelligent as the American public was. And they was about as dumb as a rock. About Vietnam, about marijuana, and other things.

When you get older, you find that things you were absolutely, positively sure about, you didn't know nothin' about." Related The 10 Best Merle Haggard Songs - Stereogum The 10 Best Merle Haggard Songs Elizabeth Bracy | April 12, 2016 - 12:37 pm Share < br />this article: CREDIT: Richard E. Aaron It has been a cruel season of loss in the music community, felt most recently with the departure of Merle Haggard, the titan of American song who passed away last Wednesday on the occasion of his 79th birthday. Along with Buck Owens, the Oildale, California native helped establish the venerable strain of country music known as the Bakersfield Sound, authored countless classic hits, and ultimately staked a claim as the poet-laureate of a proud, working-class America. A nonpareil builder of worlds through song, Haggard brought us uncanny portraits of many of society’s least glamorous and most laudable contributors. His was a landscape populated by truck drivers, steel workers, union men, and reformed criminals-made-good.

Taken together, it is a snapshot of American life still vibrant but increasingly moved to the margins of the political and cultural consciousness throughout Haggard’s life and career. Born under hardscrabble circumstances to Depression-devastated parents, young Merle was a reckless youth with a criminal streak. Petty crimes led him to multiple incarcerations in his teens and eventually a serious piece in the high security San Quentin Prison. Smart enough to know that prison life didn’t suit him, and talented enough to do something about it, Haggard was able to parlay his performing and songwriting chops into a lucrative career within a few years of his release. Spectacularly talented as a writer, performer, and interpreter of others’ material, it took the prolific Haggard little time to attain superstar status and the admiration and acceptance of peers and forerunners like Johnny Cash, George Jones, Buck Owens, and especially Willie Nelson, whose Western swing dovetailed beautifully with Haggard’s Bakersfield twang on several albums of winning collaborations.

The last of these, 2015’s wonderful Django & Jimmie, touchingly reflects on their influences, friends lost along the way, and their own pending mortality in a manner made more poignant by recent developments. For all of his appropriate stature as an American icon, the closest comparison to Haggard’s combustible combination of tough guy swagger, sepia-tinged nostalgia, crushing vulnerability, and unabashed working-class pride is perhaps Ray Davies of the Kinks. In song and life, the two geniuses are rebels equally distrustful of establishment mores and counterculture pieties. Vested with deep-seated patriotic identifications and deeply felt working class roots, they view the complications of modern life as tragically unnecessary — technology as subtraction by addition. Both hearken to and lament bygone eras, where genteel traditions and common sense overrode the chaos and insanity of modern times.

The distinct strain of small-“c” conservatism that can be heard in Haggard’s defiant, born-poor anthem “I Take A Lot Of Pride In What I Am” is reflected in Davies’ like-minded refrain “I’m Proud To Be a Muswell Hillbilly Boy.” The future-shock pessimism of Davies’ “Where Have All The Good Times Gone?” would later be echoed in Haggard’s marvelously despairing “Are The Good Times Really Over For Good?” During the Vietnam Era, Haggard’s songs “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fighting Side Of Me” were huge hits that lampooned bourgeois campus types whose protests he judged to be glib and wrongheaded in their message and execution. The impact of these songs was predictably polarizing, but he had a point. Vietnam was an unparalleled tragedy and a foreign policy catastrophe of the highest magnitude, but the condescension demonstrated by the college deferment crowd toward the conscripted GIs during and after the war was a disgrace beyond any measure.

Ultimately Haggard’s intention was not to posit the relative virtues of a Hawkish or Dovish foreign policy, but rather to reinforce a baseline commitment to the notion of American virtue that he felt was under assault from a cosmopolitan class of moneyed insurgents. “Okie From Muskogee” is not a great or even good song, but weighed against the nightly, largely ignorant anti-war “raps” dispensed to their audiences by the odiously self-satisfied Crosby, Stills & Nash, it was perhaps a proportional fit of pique. Haggard also dealt with love — its rapturous highs and brutal consequences — with a level of forensic detail that defied comfort and denied resolution. Perhaps the only antecedents in American song to the journalistic, too-close-for-comfort romantic autopsies like “What Am I Going To Do With The Rest Of My Life?” and “I Started Loving You Again Today” might be found in the most confessional work of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart. It is difficult to extrapolate how much of his five marriages and countless wrong turns in his personal life informed love songs so visceral, but the real-talk influence of this close-to-the-bone honesty is nearly impossible to calculate.

Owing to his innate intermingling of the personal and political, to his careful balance of rage and rapture, Haggard’s followers range from great country performers Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam, to rock royalty like Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen, to the outlaw gutter punk of the Mekons and Wussy. As a songwriter his legacy is indelible. As an avatar of a hard working, decently compensated middle class, Merle Haggard’s passing may represent the permanent eclipse of a specific type of American life. Here are 10 of the man’s best. 10. “What Am I Gonna Do (With The Rest Of My Life)?” (from That’s The Way Love Goes, 1983) In a catalog filled with some of the most crushing breakup ballads ever authored, few are more impactful than this wry, devastating rumination on the internal bargaining that occurs when you are living through real-time heartbreak, hour by excruciating hour.

Here the narrator engages in the simple task of listing various distractions from his lost love — smoking, drinking, hanging out with friends — only to realize that the sum total of these divertissements will only get him through one more night, with only more dark days to follow. The quietly knowing chorus brings with it the hellish implication that rock-bottom misery is the singer’s new normal. 9. “Mama Tried” (from Mama Tried, 1968) 1968’s “Mama Tried” is a Platonic ideal of a Merle Haggard song: a taut, irresistibly catchy 2:15 seconds, which manages a classic riff, a full family history, and a novel’s worth of drama and regret. The proceedings are abetted by tremendous performances from Haggard’s band the Strangers, and included the phenomenal work of guitar ace James Burton. Haggard’s economy of language and eye for detail are an absolute marvel here, signaling his uncanny ability to bring vivid characters to life within the span of a few short verses. 8.

“Silver Wings” (from A Portrait Of Merle Haggard, 1969) A touchingly straightforward ballad of romantic love and loss, as exemplified by the sight of an airplane fading from view, slowly delivering a loved one to a faraway destination. Over a gently rolling melody, Haggard juxtaposes the beauty of the plane’s glimmering arc with the singer’s nosedive crash into misery. Simple, elegant, and stunning. 7. “Swinging Doors” (from Swinging Doors, 1966) One of the greatest honky-tonk rave-ups ever written, “Swinging Doors” is a missive from an estranged lover to his former partner, informing them that he can be found night and day in his new digs — the bar down the street. A landmark early Haggard recording, this is the full flowering of his Bakersfield sound, buttressed by Ralph Mooney’s unmistakable pedal steel and Bonnie Owens’ indelible harmonies. It is an utterly idiosyncratic sound that would be endlessly imitated in the decades to follow. 6.

“If We Make It Through December” (from If We Make It Through December, 1974) A wonderfully rendered story of a hard-working man trying to keep his family’s spirits up after being laid off, this is Haggard at his social realist best, compellingly reminding the world of those who have been left behind and left in the shadows through no fault of their own. Lamenting that December should be a happy time of year, and gutted that he cannot afford Christmas presents, the narrator reasons that better times lay ahead if they can just make it through to a new year. The song serves as a quiet prayer, and all the more poignant given that there seems to be no clear sense this prayer will be answered. 5.

“Kern River” (from Kern River, 1985) This majestic, hauntingly sad ballad from 1985 reflects some of Haggard’s greatest nature writing, as he describes the panoramic sweep of Lake Shasta, Mount Whitney, and the dread Kern River itself, “a mean piece of water, my friend.” The song is a recollection of a lost lover drowned in the river, but as details begin to pile up, it becomes something more like a Biblical parable: a desperate portrait of a man attempting to hold onto his humanity, and a tribute to the beauty and terror of nature’s uncaring and unceasing capriciousness and cruelty. 4. “Today I Started Loving You Again” (from Okie From Muskogee, 1969) Co-written with his former wife and band mate Bonnie Owens, this 1969 single posits romantic love as a sort of Sisyphean challenge, impervious to reason and immutable through time.

The tone is one of curious resignation, as though love itself were a kind of malignancy: “I got over you long enough to let my heartache mend/ then today I started loving you again.” This is Haggard at his most insidiously perverse — what might appear at first blush a tenderly devotional song, reveals itself as something more like a cry for help. There is no 12-step program for recovering from romance, but if there were the singer may well belong there. 3. “Sing Me Back Home” (from Sing Me Back Home, 1968) This moving ballad portraying a condemned prisoner’s final moments and last wishes is a typically humane Haggard take on a member of a marginalized and even despised sub-group. In keeping with his frequent themes of transgression and redemption, Haggard does not suggest that the condemned man is innocent, or even that he should be pardoned. He merely finds the humanity in the last minutes of a misspent life that allows his subject to regain some semblance of connection to a better time and place. It’s called mercy, and Haggard’s songs have it in spades. 2.

“Footlights” (from Serving 190 Proof, 1979) The bone-deep, slow-burning confessional of 1979’s “Footlights” is a weary lament of professional and emotional exhaustion, and a devastating demystification of stardom. Haggard sounds stoned, even narcotic, singing an opening verse whose harsh personal inventory might send a cold chill up the spine of Leonard Cohen: “I live the kinda life most men only dream of/ I make my living writing songs and singing them/ But I’m forty-one years old and I ain’t got no place to go when it’s over/ So I hide my age and make the stage and try to kick the footlights out again.” This is rough existential terrain, where all of the fruits of your talent and labor have left you bereft of purpose and joy. On “Footlights” Haggard leaves it all on the field, tearing away one mask after another to reveal the terrible hollowness that lay beneath his swagger. 1.

“The Bottle Let Me Down” (from Swinging Doors, 1966) Equal parts winsome and tragic, this great early Haggard classic makes display of his literary gifts, as the emotionally broken narrator blames his romantic frustrations on the inanimate — namely the liquor he relies upon to drown the memory of his lost love. Haggard has a deft comic touch, and verses like “I’ve always had a bottle I can turn to/ And lately I’ve been turning every day/ But the wine don’t take effect the way it used to/ Now I’m hurting in a old familiar way” roll out as one classic punchline after the next. The rollicking mood however only barely papers over the underlying sadness of an abandoned paramour so deluded that he thinks of the bottle as his “one true friend.” Or at least he did. Listen to the playlist on Spotify .

Okie from Muskogee [King Compilation] - Merle Haggard | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic Okie from Muskogee [King Compilation] AllMusic Rating google+ AllMusic Review by AllMusic Collecting selected 1960s and early-'70s hits re-recorded by the legendary country singer, this best-of includes a version of Merle Haggard's first top 10 hit, 1965's "My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers," one of his best-known songs in "Okie From Muskogee," and ballads like "Sing Me Back Home and "Silver Wings." Track Listing Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson - Okie from muskogee - YouTube Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson - Okie from muskogee Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Uploaded on Mar 21, 2011 Merle and Willie - Okie from Muskogee 2009 live Category Okie From Muskogee - Merle Haggard - Listen to Free Music by Merle Haggard on Pandora Internet Radio more Merle Haggard As a performer and a songwriter, Merle Haggard was the most important country artist to emerge in the 1960s, and he became one of the leading figures of the Bakersfield country scene. While his music remained hardcore country, he pushed the boundaries of the music quite far. Like his idol, Bob Wills , his music was a melting pot that drew from all forms of traditional American music -- country, jazz, blues, and folk -- and in the process, developed a distinctive style of his own. As a performer, singer, and musician, he was one of the best, influencing countless other artists. Not coincidentally, he was the best singer/songwriter in country music since Hank Williams , writing a body of songs that became classics. Throughout his career, Haggard was a champion of the working man, largely due to his rough-and-tumble history.

It's impossible to separate Haggard's music from his life. He was born to James and Flossie Haggard on April 6, 1937. His parents moved from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression, converting an old boxcar into a home. Before their marriage, James played fiddle in local honky tonk bars. Flossie was a member of the Church of Christ, which led to her forcing her husband to stop playing the honky tonks. James died from a brain tumor when Merle was nine years old. After his father's death, Merle became rebellious. In an attempt to straighten her son out, his mother put him in several juvenile detention centers, but it had little effect on Merle's behavior. As a teenager, he fell in love with country music, particularly Bob Wills , Lefty Frizzell , and Hank Williams . When he was 12 years old, Haggard was given his first guitar by his older brother; Merle taught himself how to play by listening to records that were lying around the house.

Even though he had begun to pursue music, Haggard continued to rebel, running away with his friend Bob Teague to Texas when he was 14 years old. A few months later, the pair returned to California, where they were arrested as robbery suspects. After the real thieves were caught, Haggard was sent back to juvenile hall, but he and Teague took off to Modesto, California. For a brief time, he did manual labor, was a short-order cook, drove a truck, and committed a series of small crimes. Soon after he moved to Modesto, Haggard made his performing debut with Teague at a bar named the Fun Center; the two were paid five dollars and given all the beer that they could drink. By the end of 1951, Haggard had returned home and he was again arrested for truancy, as well as petty larceny. In the beginning of 1952, he was sent to Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, California; again, he ran away. This time, the courts decided he was incorrigible and sent him to the high-security Preston School of Industry; he was released after 15 months.

Shortly after his release, he and a boy he met at PSI beat up a local boy during an attempted robbery, and Haggard was sent back to PSI. After getting out of PSI for the second time, Haggard had the first major event in his musical career. He went with Teague to see Lefty Frizzell in concert in Bakersfield. Before the show, he went backstage with several friends and he sang a couple songs for Frizzell . Lefty was so impressed he refused to go on-stage until Haggard was allowed to sing a song. Merle went out and sang a few songs to an enthusiastic response from the audience. The reception persuaded Haggard to actively pursue a musical career. While he was working during the day in oil fields and farms, he performed at local Bakersfield clubs. His performances led to a spot on a local television show, Chuck Wagon. In 1956, he married Leona Hobbs; the couple moved into his family's old converted boxcar. Throughout 1957, Haggard was plagued by financial problems, which made him turn to robbery.

At the end of the year, he attempted to rob a restaurant along with two other burglars; the three were drunk at the time. Believing it was three o'clock in the morning, the trio tried to open up the back door of the restaurant. However, it was 10:30 and the establishment was still open. Although the trio fled the scene, Haggard was arrested that day. The following day, he escaped from prison in order to make peace with his wife and family; later that day, he was recaptured. Haggard was sentenced to a 15-year term and sent to San Quentin prison. Prison didn't immediately lead Merle into rehabilitation. He was fired from a series of prison jobs and planned an escape from the jail, but was talked out of it by fellow inmates. Nearly two years into his sentence, Haggard discovered that his wife was pregnant with another man's child. The news sent Haggard over the edge. Soon, he and his cellmate began a gambling racket and brewing beer in their cell. Before long, Haggard was caught drunk and was placed in isolation for a week.

During his time in isolation, he had several conversations with Caryl Chessman, an author and a member of death row. The conversations and the time in isolation convinced Haggard to turn his life around. After he left isolation, he began working in the prison's textile plant and took some high-school equivalency courses; he was also allowed to play in the prison's country band. At his second parole hearing in 1960, Haggard was given a five-year sentence -- two years and nine months in jail, two years and three months on parole; he left prison 90 days later. Merle moved back in with Leona and returned to manual labor. In the meantime, he sang at local clubs at night. After taking second place at a local talent contest, Haggard was asked to become a relief singer for a band led by Johnny Barnett at one of the most popular Bakersfield clubs, Lucky Spot. Soon, Merle was making enough money playing music that he could quit his ditch-digging job. While singing with Barnett, he gained the attention of Fuzzy Owen, who owned the small record label Tally Records. Owen and his cousin Lewis Talley were instrumental in establishing Haggard's musical career.

Owen made the first recording of Haggard, cutting a demo version of one of the singer's first songs, "Skid Row." Shortly after the recording, Haggard called Talley, who had praised him earlier in his career. Talley was able to land Haggard a job at Paul's Cocktail Lounge, which led to a slot on a local music television show. During this time, Bakersfield country was beginning to become a national scene, largely due to the hit singles of Buck Owens . At a time when mainstream country was dominated by the lush, smooth countrypolitain sound of Nashville, Bakersfield country grew out of hardcore honky tonk, adding elements of Western swing. Bakersfield country also relied on electric instruments and amplification more than other subgenres of country, giving the music a hard, driving, edgy flavor. During the late '50s, Tommy Collins and Wynn Stewart were two of the Bakersfield artists to have hits, and both were influential on Haggard's career, musically as well as professionally. Haggard had admired Stewart 's vocal style, and it helped shape his phrasing.

Early in 1962, Haggard traveled to Las Vegas to see Wynn Stewart 's club show. Stewart was not at the club, having left to find a replacement bass player. During the show, one of Stewart 's guitarists remembered Haggard and invited him to sing a couple of songs on-stage. Stewart walked in while Haggard was singing and was impressed, asking him to join his band as a bassist. For six months in 1962 and 1963, Merle performed with Stewart 's band. During this time, Haggard heard Wynn 's song "Sing a Sad Song" and asked the star if he could record it. Stewart gave him the song and Merle recorded it for Tally Records in 1963. Although Tally had minimal distribution, the record became a national hit, climbing to number 19 on the country charts early in 1964. "Sam Hill," Haggard's second single, wasn't as successful, but a duet with Bonnie Owens , the former wife of Buck Owens , called "Just Between the Two of Us," broke into the Top 40.

The next year, his version of Liz Anderson's "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers" broke him into the Top Ten and established him as a budding star. Capitol Records bought out his contract with Tally and Merle released "I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can," his first single for Capitol, in the fall of 1965. The single wasn't a success, scratching into the Top 50, but his next single, "Swinging Doors," was a smash hit, rocketing to number five in the spring of 1966. Late in 1965, Haggard began recruiting a backing band and named them the Strangers. Haggard became a genuine country superstar in 1966, with three Top Ten hits, including "Swinging Doors." "The Bottle Let Me Down" climbed to number three and "The Fugitive" (later retitled "I'm a Lonesome Fugitive") became his first number one. He was voted the Top Male Vocalist by the Academy of Country Music Awards, while he and Bonnie were named the Top Vocal Group for the second year in a row.

Haggard's songwriting was beginning to blossom and audiences embraced his music, sending his "I Threw Away the Rose" to number three early in 1967, beginning a remarkable streak of 37 straight Top Ten hits, including 23 number one singles. "I Threw Away the Rose" was followed by four straight number one hits -- "Branded Man," "Sing Me Back Home," "The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde," and "Mama Tried," which was heard in Killers Three, a movie that featured Haggard's debut as an actor. With the exception of "Bonnie and Clyde," the songs represented a change in Haggard's songwriting, as he began to directly address his troubled history. By 1970, he was talking about his time in San Quentin in the press, yet these songs represented the first time he had mentioned his past directly. Each single was a bigger hit than the previous song, which encouraged Haggard to continue writing in a more personal style.

Throughout 1968, Haggard's star continued to rise, with two number one hits ("Bonnie and Clyde," "Mama Tried") and the number three "I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am," as well as four albums. Later that year, he recorded his first conceptual album, Same Train, Different Time. Released in early 1969, the record was not only an affectionate salute to one of Haggard's heroes, it reflected a fascination with American history and a desire to expand his music by adding stronger elements of Western swing, jazz, and blues. Merle released three singles in 1969 -- "Hungry Eyes," "Workin' Man Blues," and "Okie from Muskogee" -- and all three reached number one. In particular, "Okie from Muskogee" sparked a tremendous amount of attention. An attack on the liberal hippies who represented American pop culture in the late '60s, the song struck a chord in audiences across the country, just missing the pop Top 40. Because of the song, Haggard was asked to endorse George Wallace, but he refused.

"Okie from Muskogee" cemented the singer's stardom, and he won a large amount of awards in 1969 and 1970. In both years, he was named the Top Male Vocalist by the ACM and the Strangers were voted the best band, while the new Country Music Association voted him Entertainer of the Year and Top Male Vocalist in 1970. Haggard released a sequel to "Okie" called "The Fightin' Side of Me" at the beginning of 1970, and it also shot to number one. That year, he released A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (Or My Salute to Bob Wills), which helped spark a revival of Western swing in the '70s.

Throughout 1971 and 1972, the hits kept coming, including "Soldier's Last Letter," "Someday We'll Look Back," "Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)," "Carolyn," "Grandma Harp," "It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad)," and "I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me." In 1972, the governor of California, Ronald Reagan , granted Haggard a full pardon. The following year, his hit streak continued, and he scored his biggest hit, "If We Make It Through December," which peaked at number 28 on the pop charts. As his reign on the top of the country charts continued in 1974, he played on Bob Wills ' last album, For the Last Time. Wills died in 1975, leaving Merle his fiddle. Haggard stayed with Capitol Records until 1977, and never once did his grip on the American audience slip during his tenure there. During his time on MCA afterward, he continued to have a number of hits, but his work was becoming slightly inconsistent.

His first two singles for the record label, "If We're Not Back in Love by Monday" and "Ramblin' Fever," hit number two and he continued to have hits with the label throughout the end of the decade and the first part of the '80s. "I'm Always on a Mountain When I Fall" and "It's Been a Great Afternoon" were number two hits in 1978. In 1979, he only had two hits, while in 1980, two selections from the Clint Eastwood movie Bronco Billy reached the Top Three, "The Way I Am" and "Misery and Gin"; Haggard also appeared in the film. The two hits paved the way for his two biggest singles with MCA, the number one duet with Eastwood "Bar Room Buddies" and the number one "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink." Early in 1981, Haggard had a Top Ten hit with "Leonard," a tribute to his old friend Tommy Collins . Later that year, Haggard published his autobiography, Sing Me Back Home; he also left MCA and signed with Epic Records.

Once at Epic, he began producing his own records, which gave the music a leaner sound. His first two singles for the label, "My Favorite Memory" and "Big City," were number one hits. The following year, he released a duet album with George Jones called A Taste of Yesterday's Wine, which featured the number one single "Yesterday's Wine" and the Top Ten "C.C. Waterback." From 1983 until the beginning of 1985, Haggard continued to score number one hits, including the number one duet with Willie Nelson "Pancho and Lefty." Merle's chart fortunes began to change in 1985 as a new breed of singers began to dominate the chart. Nearly every one of the artists, from George Strait to Randy Travis , was greatly influenced by Haggard, but their idol's new singles now had a tough time reaching the top of the charts. He had two Top Ten hits in 1986, and 1987's Chill Factor was a success, spawning the Top Ten title track and "Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star," which would prove to be his last number one hit.

In 1990, he signed with Curb Records, but he continued to have trouble reaching the charts; 1994 spawned his last modest hit, "In My Next Life," which reached the Top 60. When his contract with Curb ran out, Haggard, hoping for better promotion and greater artistic freedom, signed with Anti, a subsidiary of the Epitaph punk-pop label. His first effort for Anti was released in late 2000; titled If I Could Only Fly, the gentle acoustic album was greeted with strong reviews. Haggard released one more album for Anti, 2001's Roots, Vol. 1, before departing. After 2003's Like Never Before, Haggard returned to his old home, EMI, the following year, releasing a collection of American pop standards called Unforgettable at the end of that year. Chicago Wind appeared in the summer of 2005. Haggard then turned to bluegrass, releasing the appropriately titled The Bluegrass Sessions, which featured appearances by Marty Stuart , Aubrey Haynie , and Alison Krauss (among others) in 2007.

In 2008 he got the Bear Family treatment with the release of the multi-disc box sets Hag: The Studio Recordings 1969-1976 and Hag: Concepts, Live & the Strangers: The Capitol Recordings 1968-1976. I Am What I Am, an album of new songs, appeared from Vanguard Records in 2010. A second Vanguard album, Working in Tennessee, co-produced by Haggard with Lou Bradley at Haggard's own northern California studio, appeared the following year in 2011. Four years later, Haggard teamed up with his old friend Willie Nelson for Django and Jimmie, their first collaboration in 20 years. Preceded by the single "It's All Going to Pot," the album debuted at number one on the Billboard country chart upon its June 2015 release. Less than a year later, exactly on his 79th birthday (April 6, 2016), Haggard died of complications from pneumonia at his home in Palo Cedro, California.

Even when success eluded him, Merle Haggard's music remained some of the most consistently interesting and inventive in country music. Not only have his recordings remained fresh, but each subsequent generation of country singers shows a great debt to his work. That fact stands as a testament to his great talent even more than his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine Haggard, poet of common man, dies on his birthday | Archives | bakersfield.com The boxcar house that Merle Haggard grew up in arrives at the Kern County Museum. Casey Christie / The Californian Pedestrians walk past the Fox Theater marquee in downtown Bakersfield. The message was posted following news of Haggard's passing Wednesday morning. Haggard, poet of common man, dies on his birthday By JENNIFER SELF and ROBERT PRICE Apr 6, 2016 0 Photo courtesy of the Kern County Museum Merle Haggard in January 1965. Haggard, one of the top singer/songwriters in country music history, died on his 79th birthday Wednesday.

Felix Adamo / Californian Country music legend Merle Haggard had his childhood home, a former boxcar, relocated to the Kern County Museum in July of 2015. TBC Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens: They're on the back cover of the book. Photo courtesy of Billy Mize Merle Haggard, Billy Mize, Bobby Durham — with matching pompadours — in the 1960s. The trio were among a generation of talented musicians who forged a new sound in the barrooms of Bakersfield that revolutionized country music. Courtesy of Kern County Museum Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Photo courtesy of the Kern County Museum Merle Haggard, Bonnie Owens and Billy Mize in 1964. Photo courtesy of LIllian Haggard Rea Lillian and Merle Haggard in 1944. In the month since Merle's death, his sister has been stunned at the outpouring and tributes. "I didn't know he was this big a deal.

I knew he was big in the country world, but I didn't know the world was so big into country music." Photo courtesy of Lillian Haggard Rea Jim Haggard, left, with his son Merle and their dog, Jack, in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Kern County Museum Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and Glen Campbell in an undated photograph. Courtesy of Anna Reading Lewis Talley, center, and Merle Haggard, right, are featured on this postcard dated 1964. Photo courtesy of Billy Mize 001 Merle Haggard appearing on the Billy Mize Music Hall Show in 1976. John Harte / The Californian The June 1995 concert that reunited Buck Owens and Merle Haggard after decades of strife. John Harte/The Californian A photo from the June 1995 concert and video production at the Kern County Fairgrounds featuring Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. Dwight Yoakam was a special guest. Rich Pedroncelli Singer Merle Haggard is photographed at his ranch at Palo Cedro, Calif., Tuesday, Oct.

2, 2007. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) Redding Record Searchlight Merle Haggard, center, stands with his wife, Theresa Haggard, right, and his daughter, Kelli Marie Haggard, while a commercial is being shot by KIXE Channel 9 at Marigold Antiques and Collectibles in Anderson, Calif. Laura Rauch/AP Willie Nelson, left, shakes hands with Merle Haggard while performing at the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas in March 2007. Laura Rauch Merle Haggard performs at the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas on Saturday, March 10, 2007. Haggard is touring with Willie Nelson and Ray Price. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch) TBC Merle Haggard, Rolling Stone magazine, October 2009 issue. Rich Pedroncelli **FILE**In this Oct. 2, 2007 file photo, singer Merle Haggard poses at his ranch at Palo Cedro, Calif. Haggard has sued an environmental awareness group, claiming it illegally used his name and likeness to raise money.

(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File) Ron Sachs/ABACAUSA.COM 2010 Kennedy Center honorees Sir Paul McCartney, left, and Merle Haggard, center, share some conversation after posing for their formal class photo following the formal Artist's Dinner at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C,. on Dec. 4, 2010. Haggard's wife, Theresa Ann Lane, looks on from the right. TBC Merle Haggard autographs a copy of The Californian to send to Salem Palmer. Palmer, 10, saved the life of a fellow student at Highland Elementary School by performing the Heimlich maneuver when the student was choking on a piece of pizza. Palmer was awarded the Mayor's Medal of Appreciation. Felix Adamo Merle Haggard and his sister Lillian Haggard Rea hold an angel that will lay on the foundation underneath the boxcar home they both grew up in once the former boxcar is in place at the Kern County Museum. John Farrand / The Californian The boxcar house that Merle Haggard grew up in arrives at the Kern County Museum.

Casey Christie / The Californian Pedestrians walk past the Fox Theater marquee in downtown Bakersfield. The message was posted following news of Haggard's passing Wednesday morning. Merle Haggard composed the soundtrack of a generation of displaced Okies, Arkies and Texans — the rootlessness, the poverty, the field work — but he did it with such towering artistry that the Oildale native, the son of a railroad man and God-fearing mother, belonged not just to Bakersfield but the world. The poet of the common man died at 9:20 a.m. Wednesday — his 79th birthday — on his tour bus at his home near Redding surrounded by family, according to Fuzzy Owen, his manager of 54 years, who was with the singer when he died. The cause was pneumonia, which he’d been battling since December. Haggard’s wife, Theresa, sent a hand-written note to The Californian expressing her sorrow. “He was the best singer, songwriter and performer I’ve ever seen. Not only did he write the songs he sang, he was the music.

”I will miss him forever.“ Son Ben Haggard and other sources said Wednesday the singer had predicted he would die on his birthday. He’d asked to be taken out to the tour bus two or three days ago, Owen said. But it wasn’t unusual for the singer, who wrote so expressively about his lifelong wanderlust, to stay on the bus while at home. “You'd have to be a musician to understand,” Owen said. Recording artist and self-proclaimed “Bakersfield Sound disciple” Marty Stuart, a frequent collaborator and close friend of Haggard’s, was succinct when asked Wednesday to explain Haggard’s impact. “Country music has lost the last true chief from that era,” he said. “I always thought there was Merle and then there was everybody else.” The reaction in Bakersfield was shock even though many knew Haggard’s prognosis had been grim. Jim Shaw, bandleader for the late Buck Owens, met Haggard in early 1970 and recalled what his old boss — a mentor of Haggard’s — thought of the singer.

“When Buck Owens through the years was asked who was the best country music singer/songwriter, it was always Merle Haggard,” Shaw said. “There was no bigger fan of Merle Haggard than Buck Owens.” ’I grew up here with intentions of escaping’ Haggard, famously schooled on train rails and in jail cells, became a songwriter and vocalist of astonishing power and skill, his gifts and blue-collar point-of-view earning the nickname poet of the common man. He chronicled love, loss, poverty and pride with a poignant and resonant urgency that belied his nominal job description of country music singer and placed him in the rarified company of such American giants as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and George Gershwin. Haggard experienced both life’s darkest depths and headiest highs, from a stint in San Quentin State Prison, where he turned 21, to his 2010 recognition for lifetime achievement and “outstanding contribution to American culture” from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the most prestigious award in a long list of them that included three Grammys and dozens of country music industry honors.

He wrote and recorded some of country music’s most memorable and commercially successful songs, from “Okie From Muskogee” to “Mama Tried” — recently selected by the Library of Congress to its National Recording Registry. Between 1966 and 1987, Haggard and his band recorded 38 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country charts and another 33 that reached the top 10. His songs have been recorded by artists as diverse as the Everly Brothers and Elvis Costello, and one song alone, “Today I Started Loving You Again,” has been recorded by more than 400 performers. Along the way, Haggard, his equally famous contemporary, Buck Owens, and other notable players like Red Simpson, Tommy Collins and Billy Mize forged a raw and raucous subgenre, what became known as the Bakersfield Sound, which in many ways was the antithesis of Nashville’s softer, more polished recordings, especially throughout the 1960s. “Every time you hear a Telecaster guitar, you’re hearing the Bakersfield Sound,” Stuart told The Californian.

“When you hear a two-part clear harmony, you’re hearing the Bakersfield Sound.” Haggard would continue to live in Bakersfield throughout much of his commercial and artistic heyday, but he had a complicated relationship with the city he made famous and his real hometown of Oildale, just across the Kern River from Bakersfield. In January 2015, he walked through, for the last time, the house where he grew up on Yosemite Drive, just yards from the railroad tracks that beckoned to him as a boy. A community group had begun a campaign to move and restore the home, a rail car converted by the singer’s father. “I grew up here with intentions of escaping,” Haggard said then. Love of music from the start Merle Ronald Haggard was born at Kern General Hospital on April 6, 1937, and raised in Oildale. At that time, James Haggard, Merle’s father, had a $40-per-week job as a carpenter with the Santa Fe Railroad, allowing him to support his family better than most Depression-era fathers.

He had also acquired a refrigerated box car that had been moved off the rails and onto a lot 100 yards south of a heavily used main track line. This he fashioned into a sturdy, 1,200-square-foot home. Haggard demonstrated a love of music almost from the start. He has recalled pointing to the radio and asking for “stewed ham” — toddler talk, his mother eventually realized, for country singer Stuart Hamblen, whose 4 p.m. broadcast out of Los Angeles was a family favorite. But the idyll of childhood was shattered one night in June 1946 when Merle came home from a Wednesday night prayer meeting to find his father paralyzed from a stroke. James Haggard died the next day. It affected Merle, then 9, profoundly. His mother, Flossie Haggard, was forced to take a $35-a-week job as a bookkeeper for a meat-packing company, and suddenly it was just mother and son, the older siblings, Lowell and Lillian Haggard Rea, having already set out on their own.

Haggard attended Standard School in Oildale, Mountain View School in Lamont, and, very briefly, Bakersfield High School. He spent time in juvenile hall for truancy, and the experience probably did more harm than good, said his sister in a January 2015 interview with The Californian. “A lot of his problems early on related to unresolved grief over our father's death,” Haggard Rea said. He committed a string of petty crimes and jailhouse escapes that eventually landed him in San Quentin State Prison for almost two years. That experience — along with a harrowing Huck Finn-meets-Harry Houdini youth, hopping freight trains, singing for beer, stealing cars, surviving automobile wrecks, botching burglaries, escaping from jails and, finally, serving time in one of California’s most notorious state prisons — was more than ample fodder for the story lines that would comprise his prolific body of work. In November 1960, San Quentin officials gave Haggard $15 and a bus ticket home. He’d spent seven of his 23 years inside one institution or another, locked up.

’Best damn singin’ I ever heard’ Back in Bakersfield, Haggard landed a fill-in job at an Edison Highway joint called the Lucky Spot, where he met Charles “Fuzzy” Owen and Lewis Talley, cousins from Arkansas who fancied themselves recording executives-in-training. “I was playing in the band at the Lucky Spot and it was on a Sunday,” Owen said Wednesday, recalling the day in 1962 he met Haggard. “We had two shifts and I played the first shift and then Merle come in with Jelly Sanders and bunch of ’em and played the last shift and I just happened to be hanging around and heard him sing. I told Merle, ’That was the best damn singin’ I ever heard,’ and he said, ’Why don't you sign me?’ And I said OK.” Haggard’s brother-in-law, Bill Rea, gave the singer’s career a further assist by making a cold call to the producer of Cousin Herb’s “Trading Post,” a wildly popular daily Bakersfield television program. Haggard auditioned and was added to the show’s lineup two afternoons a week.

Favorable fan mail started pouring in, and soon Haggard was performing five days a week on the “Trading Post.” Tally Records, on the strength of Haggard’s January 1965 top-10 hit, “All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers,” sold his contract to Capitol Records’ A&R man, Ken Nelson. A long succession of hits followed. Between 1966 and 1987, Haggard and the Strangers were a formidable combo that featured guitarists Roy Nichols and James Burton, Farmersville-bred steel guitarist Norm Hamlet, and cousins Owens and Talley. In 1969, Haggard’s music took a sudden political turn with “Okie From Muskogee,” a phenomenon that forever changed Haggard’s career, thrusting him into the firestorm of the 1960s culture wars. The song was regaled as the anthem of the silent majority in the difficult days of mounting casualties in Vietnam, anti-war demonstrations and counter-culture hippies.

The song, recorded in Hollywood on July 17, 1969, made Haggard the hottest commodity in country music, and a tough ticket at venues across the country. As a single, the song sold 264,000 copies the first year, and as an album (“Okie” was the title track) it surpassed 885,000 — making it one of the few country albums of the period to achieve gold-record status. So great was Haggard’s association with all things conservative and traditional, George Wallace, through campaign intermediaries, asked Haggard to endorse him in his bid for re-election as governor of Alabama. Ernest Tubb had already signed on but Haggard refused. A regular guest star on television variety shows hosted by Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Barbara Mandrell and others, Haggard had become the darling of the American Right, a fact made even more evident when in 1970 California Gov. Ronald Reagan granted Haggard a full and unconditional pardon for past crimes. Richard Nixon invited him to the White House in 1973 to sing at wife Pat’s staid birthday party.

Writing until the end Though the Bakersfield Sound faded as a commercial force in the late 1970s, Haggard had already transcended the label and city, becoming the decade’s most commercially successful country performer. In June, he and his longtime friend and colleague Willie Nelson released “Django and Jimmie,” which topped the country charts. His single from that album, “It’s All Going to Pot,” reached No. 48, his first charting single since 1999’s “That's the Way Love Goes,” a re-recording with Jewel. Eager to keep the “Django and Jimmie” momentum going, Haggard was writing songs until the end and told Owen and Stuart he was planning to record what he’d written. “A week ago Sunday he called me and he said, ’I just wrote me a good song,’” Stuart said.

“It’s called ’My Final Escape.’” Sturgill Simpson, one of the few newer country artists the icon professed to admire, said Haggard texted him six weeks ago with the lyrics to a new song he called “Hobo Cartoon.” Another person in Haggard’s close circle said Haggard texted him with lyrics he’d just written about the conflicted, emotional day he left Bakersfield for a new, permanent home in Shasta County. “There was still so much more in him,” said Simpson, who opened for Haggard and Kris Kristofferson last winter on what proved to be Haggard’s final tour. “That’s what is so tragic here — he never stopped writing, never stopped creating.” Even during fallow periods in his recording career, Haggard never left the road for long, eventually bringing his family on stage. His wife was a frequent backup singer and his youngest son, Ben, took up lead Telecaster guitar. The latest incarnation of his band, the Strangers, stayed remarkably busy. Haggard craved it.

“You people,” he once told an audience in Idaho, “are keeping me alive.” Haggard comes home In the early 1980s Haggard moved to Lake Shasta, 450 miles to the north, and locals saw him considerably less. But then in 2008, a portion of Bakersfield’s 7th Standard Road, including the entrance to Kern County’s main commercial airport, was renamed Merle Haggard Drive and Haggard had a freeway offramp with his name on it, just four miles north of Buck Owens Boulevard. Bakersfield started seeing a lot more of Haggard after that. Haggard was married five times, first, in 1956, to Leona Hobbs (they had four children: Dana, Marty, Kelli, Noel); in 1965 to singer Bonnie Owens, former wife of Buck Owens; in 1978 to singer Leona Williams; and in 1985 to Debbie Parret. On Sept. 11, 1993, Haggard’s friend and former collaborator, Tommy Collins, a minister, performed his wedding to the former Theresa Ann Lane.

The Haggards had two children, Jenessa and Ben. A funeral service is scheduled for Saturday on Haggard’s property in Palo Cedro in Shasta County. The memorial will be private, according to Haggard’s attorney. The performer, possibly thinking of his final act, left a detailed list of funeral instructions to guide his wife and family. He asked that two recordings by his idol Lefty Frizzell be played and he extended an invitation to friends and touring partners Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson to perform a song of their choosing. Marty Stuart and his wife, recording artist Connie Smith, will perform Haggard’s own “Silver Wings,” and Stuart will preside over the ceremony. Among Haggard’s pallbearers are his youngest son, Ben, and nephew Jim Haggard. The document stated that Haggard wishes to be cremated.

Question: In the song by Merle Haggard the singer was proud to be a what from Muskogee?
Answer: Okie