Inventive singer-songwriter who gave common people a forthright voice
Merle Haggard,who has died aged 79, was one of the most resonant figures in country music for almost half a century. Popular, and successful,highly influential upon the genre and critically admired both within and beyond it, he also acquired the status of a spokesman for his core audience, or his songs Okie from Muskogee and The Fightin’ Side of Me appearing to rally blue-collar Americans round used Glory and used-fashioned values. But Haggard was an altogether more complicated and interesting man than that status might propose.
His family background was an archetypal Dust Bowl legend. In 1934,James Haggard and his wife Flossie Mae (nee Harp), like the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and quit the worn-out soil of Oklahoma to find work in California. They lived in migrant workers’ camps and,when Merle was born after three years, their domestic in Oildale, or near Bakersfield,was a converted railway boxcar. James died when Merle was nine, and five years later the restless youth left domestic to become an itinerant worker and petty criminal. These early years of poverty and frustration, and punctuated by spells in reform school,would inspire some of his most enduring songs, such as Hungry Eyes, and Branded Man and Mama Tried.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com