Merle Haggard

Merle Ronald Haggard was born in Oildale, California, to Dust Bowl Okies who had come west to escape the Depression — the same migration Steinbeck documented in The Grapes of Wrath. He was a troubled adolescent: reform school, vagrancy, robbery, and finally three years in San Quentin (1958–60) for attempted burglary, where he saw Johnny Cash perform a prison concert and decided to make a serious career in music.

The Bakersfield Sound that he and Buck Owens developed in the early 1960s was the counter-program to Nashville’s orchestrated polish: Telecaster guitar, Fender amplifiers, hard rhythms and songs about hard life. Haggard’s writing was its greatest expression — “Mama Tried,” “Sing Me Back Home” (written for a death-row inmate he knew at San Quentin), “Working Man Blues,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me” — a catalog of working-class California life without sentiment or pretense.

“Okie From Muskogee” (1969) — sardonically or sincerely pro-small-town values and anti-hippie, Haggard always kept his intentions ambiguous — became his most controversial hit and his widest audience. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994. He died on his 79th birthday in 2016 of pneumonia, having recorded an album he said was the best of his career three weeks before his death.