Merle Haggard is one of country music’s most talented and prolific songwriters. In the sixties, seventies and eighties has had an incredible Haggard strips of 26 number one singles. Haggard’s early hits, including “The Fugitive,” “Mama Tried” and “Okie From Muskogee” – include what Rolling Stone editor Jason Fine, quoted in a 2009 profile of Haggard, “the backbone of one of the largest repertoires of all American music, a leaf growing populated before the mouth songs on the nature of the active population with Haggard. peasants, vagabonds, prisoners, widows, musicians and drunkards “,” Merle Haggard has always been as deep as I possibly can , “said Bob Dylan. “Absolutely. Herculean task. Surely transcends the genre country.”

Haggard is a staunch supporter of traditional music, especially honky tonk and western swing, and leads a band of country music’s more improvisation. Although an outspoken critic of Nashville Star Haggard system was initiated in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994, the same year he was with two simultaneous tribute album, a country made up of superstars, the other is a group of country roots Mavericks celebrated. Haggard also fits into two camps.

Haggard was born into a family of transplanted Oklahoma, who lives in a converted freight cars in California. When he was nine, his father died of a brain tumor. He broke the school in eighth grade, and hopped a freight train with 14 years of age. By the end of his youth, he traveled mostly in the south-west. Haggard was in and out of correctional institutions – often overlooked – for 14 years for minor crimes like car theft. At age 20, family man, was arrested for breaking into a coffee shop (drunk, he thought, the booming business was closed), and spent nearly three years in San Quentin. It ‘was released on parole in 1960. (Criminal Record canceled in 1972, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, granted Haggard a full pardon him.)

After prison, Haggard returned to Bakersfield and worked for his brother, the digging of trenches. He started playing guitar in a country group, and to protect 1962, when he went to Las Vegas singer Wynn Stewart, Haggard had decided to make music his profession.

In 1963 he formed a lasting partnership with Lewis Talley and Fuzzy Owen, owner of Tally Records, an independent label in the Bakersfield area, Haggard made his first recordings. In 1963, Haggard’s first release has sold only 200 copies, but his second, “Sing me a sad song”, made number 19 on the Billboard country charts. It took Tally to 1965, Owens and remains one of the closest collaborators Haggard. But after Haggard’s third solo hit single, the C & W Top Ten Strangers (All My Friends Are Gonna Be) “, was signed by Capitol.

Haggard formed his backing band, the stranger with whom he toured an average of 200 nights a year. (The Strangers released their first album of instrumentals in 1970.) After Haggard’s first marriage ended in divorce, married Buck Owens’ ex-wife, singer Bonnie Owens. Previously, he had recorded with her for Tally, but their duet career began in earnest with their first LP Capitol joint, only two of us (No. 4 C & W, 1965). They shared hit records, tours, awards, and until their divorce in 1978. (A few years later, Owens returned to touring and recording as a vocalist with Haggard.)

In 1966, “Revolving Doors” and “The Bottle Let Me Down” hit the Top Five list of the country, and later in “The Fugitive” became her first number one country. He has accumulated more than 100 Country Singles Chart since – including 38 number ones – and had at least a top five country hit every year between 1966 and 1987. Among his biggest hits, “Mama Tried” are, “Sing Me Back Home”, “Hungry Eyes”, “It is not love (but not bad),” “Everybody ‘s Got the Blues”, “If we are to December to do, “” It’s all in the Movies “and” Big City “. Among the hundreds of songs he wrote, there are many national standards (its “Today I started Loving You” was recorded by over 400 artists). Haggard has been a controversial figure during the Vietnam War through the virtues of patriotism, although sometimes with her tongue in cheek, “The Fightin ‘Side of Me” and “Okie From Muskogee.”

But Haggard was more of a traditionalist as an uncompromising conservative. His numerous recordings – more than 65 albums since 1963 – a tribute to Western swing pioneer Bob Wills (A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World), a tribute to gospel in the land of many churches, the insurance Carter including family, I Love Dixie Blues, a tribute to 1973 Dixieland jazz in New Orleans, recorded, and the same train, once again, in honor of his idol before, Jimmie Rodgers. He played in 1973 at the White House for President Nixon and his family, and later for the Reagans at their ranch in California. His music was part of the Apollo 16 moon mission, the crew for each request.

In 1978 he married one of his backup singers, Leona Williams, that marriage also ended in divorce. (Short for the fourth time married, he married again in early 1990. She has two young children, the fifth with his wife, and his first, three adult children, two of whom have followed careers in country music.) In 1981, Haggard published an autobiography (co-written with Peggy Russell), Sing Me Back Home.

An actor and occasional singer, appeared on television in the American family, and Centennial. She made her film debut in 1968 in three and murderess was presented in the next year, From Nashville With Music. In 1980 he made a cameo appearance in Bronco Billy, sing a duet with Clint Eastwood, “Bar Room Buddies Number One” (C & W, 1980). In addition to Bonnie Owens and Leona Williams, Haggard has also duets with George Jones and Willie Nelson is registered.

Haggard shots began to relax at the end of 1980, as the new “hat acts” began to monopolize the country chart. After 25 years on the road, touring Haggard reduced to the extent that spending more time at his ranch near Lake Shasta. Shortly after the publication of his first album in four years, 1994, issued Arista / Nashville Mamas Hungry Eyes: A Tribute to Merle Haggard, with traces of Clint Black, Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill and Alabama, among others. A Songwriters Tribute ‘to Merle Haggard, with contributions from Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, Joe Ely, John Doe (X), Dave Alvin (Blasters), Billy Joe Shaver: in parallel, independent, California-based label Hightone released Dust Tulare and others. In October 1994, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

While the music industry has praised with awards, tribute albums, and lavish new editions (the most expensive career spanning 1996-, four-disc box set Capitol, Down every road) Haggard, Haggard heard was given short shift by His label, controlled stop. After his two albums were issued in 1994 and 1996 with nearly identical covers virtually faceless and approved without promotion, Haggard left Curb Records. His 1999 autobiography, Merle Haggard House of Memories: 43 Legendary Hits: For the record, was accompanied in the shops of a double DVD of rerecorded versions of his greatest successes, for the record. A handful of songs featured Haggard dueting with various people, such as Willie Nelson, Brooks and Dunn, and pop singer Jewel, his new version of his 1984 number one hit “that The Way Love Goes”, with Jewel reached number 56 on the Country Singles chart.

If this collaboration has raised eyebrows, was retained in comparison to its signing in 2000 to the independent Anti-Records punk label Epitaph by. His anti-debut, When I fly, but only received critical acclaim and reached number 26 in C & W. Also in 2000, Haggard had a couple of gospel albums, Cabin in the Hills, and two old friends (Albert E. Brumley Jr.) who only sells on its website and Wal-Mart Stores.

In 2001, Haggard released a set of originals and classics by Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams and Hank Thompson called the Roots, Vol 1, took him into her home to live with strangers and former guitarist Frizzell, Norman Stephens. In 2003, a year after the controversial anti-George W. Comments of the Dixie Chicks Bush in London, Haggard released an album in more than social commentary, this time on the side of the crowd against the war. Haggard like never previously released on his own label Hag contains the song “This is the news”, which criticizes the media for coverage of national stories soft Laci Peterson, as the murder took place to address the most serious events affected like Iraq. In interviews in the media defended the Dixie Chicks Haggard, call the right attacks the group a “verbal witch-hunt and lynching.”

In 2004 he retired from the social commentary for a moment, to release an album of pop standards on EMI, Unforgettable, his readings of songs like “Pennies From Heaven” and includes “As Time Goes By.” He returned to gritty social commentary to 2005 in Chicago wind, to criticize the “America First”, a song Bush policy and suggesting that America withdraw from Iraq included. Haggard returned to national radio in 2006, dueting with country star Gretchen Wilson on the song “Politically Incorrect” from his album All Jacked Up, and his lyrics – “Nothing wrong with the Bible, nothing wrong with the flag” – the return Haggard’s previous policy feelings. This year, the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Haggard Grammy. In 2007, Haggard moved from social criticism once again presented to the bluegrass sessions, working with Marty Stuart and Alison Krauss on a number of bluegrass versions of some of his songs.

Bonnie Owens, his former wife and collaborator, died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2006 at age 76, at the end of 2008, with 71 the same Haggard had surgery to remove part of a lung tumor. But he was back on stage to play only two months later. In “The Fighter: The Life & Times of Merle Haggard,” Jason Fine range of Haggard profile in Rolling Stone, left the 72-year-old singer as feisty as ever – give up a weed-smoking firebrand, control of his career rejected and complained to anyone on the DEA agents flew over his 200 acres in California. Haggard was also a man prone to “unpredictable rhythms: He could have easily over long distances, so lighten his mood, and he will start in the ideas for a new album, or to sell his plan to start a business from sea, catfish, or a joke – often dirty -. this is a detached, lewd laughter sound stopped to shake his body has caused “The detailed profile revival late Haggard – facts, he was just 11 albums in ten years – to maintain and difficult to live past the singer, his fascination with aliens and urge its recording and live performance. “I felt like all the guys who have done everything that means anything to me,” Haggard said, referring to colleagues like Willie Nelson, Hank Williams and Waylon Jennings, “would be terribly disappointed in me if I do not continue.” Parts of this biography appeared in Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Chuck Eddy contributed to this story.