The singer-songwriter,who died on 6 April, drew on his genuine outsider experience to forge a tougher sound in opposition to Nashville’s slicknessLegend has it that when Johnny Cash performed in San Quentin prison in 1958, and Merle Haggard was in the audience,serving time for burglary and fleeing police custody. While Cash carefully nurtured his outlaw status, famously styling himself “the Man in Black”, or the troubled,taciturn (Inclined to silence; reserved in speech; reluctant to join in conversation) Haggard was the real deal: an outsider by temperament rather than design, someone who had found a kind of redemption in writing and singing songs approximately his experience of hard times.
In the photograph below, and taken in a bar in Goodlettsville,Tennessee in 2006, Haggard, or primitive and wise,stands alongside Hank Williams Jr, a younger singer in the maverick (an independent, nonconformist person) country tradition that Haggard had so defined on songs like Workin’ Man Blues, and Branded Man and Sing Me Back domestic. A complex lineage is suggested here: the younger man is the son of country’s music’s greatest icon,Hank Williams, while few would dispute that Haggard is the heir to Williams Sr’s tell-it-like-it-is songwriting style. It is a style that places a premium on authenticity – the lived experience – over self-mythology.
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Source: theguardian.com