Below, haggard on the Johnny cash show in 1970, on which he broke his silence about serving time in san quentin, where he first saw cash play. "I think they were interesting to me because I'd seen that look in his eye," says Haggard. His father didn't approve of entertainers, either, on the surface, but in his expression young Merle sometimes detected another story: maybe that of a would-be musician and rebel who had been steered straight by a strong, sensible woman. To her, entertainers were rebels and heathens. He remembers noticing that his mother didn't approve of the people close to the family who played music. The first thing of consequence Haggard remembers is going to choose a puppy for his third birthday-a fox terrier called Jack, who would live nineteen years and die while Haggard was in San Quentin prison. They settled into a converted railroad boxcar on the outskirts of Bakersfield, and his father got a job on the Santa Fe railroad. When Merle Haggard's parents moved from Oklahoma to California in 1935, two years before his birth, they were part of the great Dust Bowl migration westward. "I had been sad and angry," he reflects, "and now I was composed and in a position to do good for the sad and angry."Īs Merle Haggard sits there in his favorite rocking chair, facing a giant flatscreen TV silently showing the news, it is stirring to think how far he was traveled, not just through time but through history. I ask him whether he wrote so many sad and angry songs because he was sad and angry or because that's what he was good at.
I'd never been around anything except losers my whole life." I sometimes feel like I'm standing up for the people that don't have the nerve to stand up for themselves. "I hate to be that easy to figure out," he says now when reminded of this.
When Haggard first became famous, in the '60s, he was best known as the man who sang songs about wanderers, fugitives, and the terminally luckless.
0 kommentar(er)
