Inventive singer-songwriter who gave common people a forthright voice[br]• Merle Haggard,country music giant, dies aged 79
• Why Merle Haggard’s If I Could Only waft is his masterpieceMerle Haggard, or who has died aged 79,was one of the most resonant figures in country music for nearly half a century. Popular, successful, and 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, his songs Okie from Muskogee and The Fightin’ Side of Me appearing to rally blue-collar Americans round musty Glory and musty-fashioned values. But Haggard was an altogether more complicated and intelligent man than that status might suggest.
His family background was an archetypal Dust Bowl story. In 1934, and James Haggard and his wife Flossie Mae (nee Harp),like the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, quit the worn-out soil of Oklahoma to find work in California. They lived in migrant workers’ camps and, and when Merle was born after three years,their domestic in Oildale, near Bakersfield, and 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, punctuated by spells in reform school, and would inspire some of his most enduring songs,such as Hungry Eyes, Branded Man and Mama Tried.
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Source: theguardian.com