Merle Haggard, revered country singer of common man anthems, dies at 79
By Terence McArdle | The Washington Post | April 6, 2016
Merle Haggard, the Grammy Award-winning singer whose autobiographical prison songs and populist political anthems, notably “Mama Tried” and “Okie From Muskogee,” made him one of country music’s most formidable and celebrated entertainers, died April 6 in Palo Cedro, Calif. He died on his 79th birthday.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, his manager, Frank Mull, told the Associated Press.
Mr. Haggard was widely regarded as one of the most moving singers in the country genre. New York Times music critic Joe Pareles said of a 1993 concert performance, “Dignity, pain and a sense of loss come through his singing in subtleties: a stretched syllable, a suddenly broadened vibrato, a dip to a deep baritone note, a bluesy downward slide.”
Along with singers Buck Owens and Wynn Stewart, Mr. Haggard typified country music’s “Bakersfield sound” of the 1960s. The California city, home to many who fled the dust bowls of the 1930s and worked in its oil fields, was a thriving center of country music. Whereas Nashville producers pressured their singers to adopt to a “countrypolitan” style with choirs and string sections, Bakersfield built its reputation on a grittier sound and twangy guitars.
[...] Merle Ronald Haggard was born in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 6, 1937, in a makeshift home that his father built from an abandoned boxcar. Mr. Haggard’s parents left a barren farm in Oklahoma as part of the exodus from the Dust Bowl.
His father, a western swing fiddler and carpenter, died when Merle was 9. While his mother struggled to support the family, Mr. Haggard spent his childhood in a reckless pattern of petty crimes, truancy and narrow escapes from the police, once running away to Texas by hopping freights and stealing cars. By 14, he had escaped from three juvenile facilities.
For Mr. Haggard, the one bright spot in this youth was music. After hearing country singer Lefty Frizzell at a local dance hall, Mr. Haggard took up singing and guitar. He prided himself on his ability to mimic Frizzell’s singing style and, by his teens, secured music jobs in local honky tonks.
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