Lord, They've Done It All

As the old blues singers would have put it, he was a real bad-ass man. While still a kid in California, he escaped from two reform schools seven times. At age 18 he moved on to car theft. That drew him ten months in the Ventura County jail. Next time came a 90-day sentence for raiding a scrap-metal yard.

A year later he made a real name for himself--California 845200. This time he was in San Quentin on a two-year, nine-month rap for attempting to hold up a bar in his home town, Bakersfield. As cocky and uncontrollable as they come, he steamed up some home brew under the guards' noses--and got caught. As his 21st birthday rolled around, he found himself in solitary confinement with only pajama bottoms, a Bible and a blanket on a cement floor to call his own. At long last he was convinced that something was wrong with the way he was leading his life.

The right way turned out to be the country music he had known and sung since childhood. The ex-con who had spent seven of his first 23 years locked up went on to become Country Superstar Merle Haggard, who could mesmerize one crowd after another by singing:

Did you ever steal a quarter when you was ten years old?

Ever wear a brogan with a hole in the sole?

Did you ever ride a freight train while runnin 'from the law?

I've done it all, Lord,

Lord, I've done it all.

Ballads like I've Done It All--tough, honest, "hurtin' songs" from the heart--helped Haggard, now 37, to live one of the classic success stories in the half-century history of country music. He started in the early 1960s as a $40-a-week sideman guitarist. Today he is the king of country who commands $15,000 a concert and in the past decade has sold more than 8 million LP albums and 3.5 million singles worth $44.5 million. The writer of his own words and music, he has won every honor and award that can be given by the imperial city of country music, Nashville.

Shouting crowds of fans turn out everywhere on Haggard's current nationwide tour. Giving his first concerts ever in New York City last month, he packed the 4,600-seat Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden twice in one night. Last week, as the Haggard caravan worked its way from Wichita, into Oklahoma City and Tulsa, the scene was a familiar one. The lean, darkly virile star came out in plain navy blue slacks and open shirt, leaned into the spotlight and sang in his sensuous, leathery baritone Things Aren't Funny Anymore, the current No. 1 country single.

We used to laugh a lot.

We never cried.

But things are all different now,

Since your sweet love has died.

The crowd of 4,000 in Wichita's Century II convention hall knew every song and clapped their hands, slapped their knees and snapped gum in time to the music.

Like his songs, a Haggard concert is simple and direct. No fancy cowboy suits, rhinestone decorations or hand-tooled boots for him. He may introduce his wife Bonnie Owens, a well-known singer who divorced Country Star Buck Owens twelve years before she married Haggard in 1965. Or he will tease his fans by saying "Merle Haggard isn't here tonight. I'm filling in for him. Those of you who aren't country music fans, you're in the wrong damn place."

Hint of Rock. Not much danger of that. Country-music fans can be found everywhere in the U.S. today. After half a century of condescension, neglect and even ridicule, country in all its guises--bluegrass, heart songs, western ballads, rural blues, delta white soul, Memphis honky-tonk and of course the familiar pop hybrid known as the Nashville Sound--is in the midst of an astronomic growth and gives no signs of stopping. In the record industry, it accounts for roughly one-fifth of the $2 billion in yearly sales. In Nashville last week, camera crews were at work on a movie about country music-- W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings, starring Burt Reynolds, and Robert Altman is planning another.

With durable syndicated programs like Hee Haw (208 stations) and The Porter Wagoner Show (100), as well as several annual specials, network television is hardly ignoring the trend. But the most dramatic illustration of all lies in pop radio. In 1961, the number of stations playing nothing but country stood at a mere 80; now there are more than 1,000. New York City's 50,000-watt WHN, in the ratings cellar 14 months ago, went to an all-country format; it has since doubled its audience and is now the No. 1 country station in the U.S., with 1.2 million listeners.

The country boom, of course, has reverberated far beyond its historic home in Nashville. Bakersfield, Calif., which is known for a scruffier, less polished sound, has long been the base of Haggard and such other stars as Buck Owens, Susan Raye, Freddie Hart and Buddy Alan. Now there is another Nashville satellite, Austin, Texas, where Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Murphey are exponents of what might be called progressive country, which has a strong hint of rock.

Nashville, however, remains the capital. There are 57 major recording studios going full time, and an untallyable number of "garage" (private) studios where a country hopeful can make a "demo" (demonstration record). The Grand Ole Opry has just moved into an opulent, $15 million new auditorium at the Disneyesque Opryland, U.S.A., where President Nixon visited in March and declared, "Only one thing is stronger than country moonshine--and that is country music." In Nashville, an industrious studio musician can make close to $100,000 a year.

What is the fuss all about? Glen George, manager of Kansas City's country radio KCKN, says: "Anything that Grandma can hum, whistle or sing is country." Its traditional message is one of despair, hope, loss, death, the land and, often with cloying sentimentality, love. Country lyrics have always been the cry of the common man. They can, and do give comfort to everyone from sharecroppers and truck-stop waitresses to University of Texas Football Coach Darrell Royal, former Energy Czar John Love, Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Operatic Tenor Richard Tucker. Says Moon Mullins, program director of the all-country WINN in Louisville: "If you listen to our station long enough, one of our songs will tell your story."

Cynics like to say that whomever the story belongs to, it will probably deal with trucks, trains, prison, drinking (or moonshine), women misbehaving ("slippin' around" in the country vernacular) or death. The ideal country song might be about a guy who finally gets out of prison, hops a truck home, finds that his wife is slippin' around, gets drunk, and staggers to his doom in front of a highballing freight.

Vanilla Sameness. The music itself, at least as purveyed by many of the superstars of Nashville and Bakersfield, has a vanilla sameness to it that often does not reflect the pain and sorrow of the words. The voices of the singers are often less charged with emotion than their blues and rock counterparts. Most male country stars have deep bass baritones that seem to say: this man sits tall in the saddle. Women stars tend to have bright, unstrained sopranos--or a Lynn Anderson land of nasal chirpiness--that rule out not only women's lib but any other kind of defiance. In the past, country lyrics have been astonishingly repressive. Blind loyalty to husband, parents, even political leaders has been a common theme. When men have sung about women, the subject (always excepting long-suffering Mother) has often been the pain, not the pleasure.

Today, however, country is taking on a new sound, and a new diversity and message as well. Partly that is due to the influence of rock, partly to the visible softening of the once strong accents of American regionalization. Says Kris Kristofferson, 37, the former Rhodes scholar who is now a leader of country's progressive wing: "There's really more honesty and less bullshit in today's music than ever before."

This honesty ranges from Waylon Jennings' song of adultery in This Time ("I won't allow the things you used to do!/ You'll have to toe the mark and walk the line") to Tammy Wynette's look at one of its sometime results in DIVORCE.

Merle Haggard calls country lyrics "just journalism put to music." That definition suits some recent hits particularly well. There have been songs about ecology (One Hundred Children, Sonic Bummer, Don't Go Near the Water), welfare (Geronimo's Cadillac), amorphous doubts about politics and leadership (Vermont Suite: More Cows Than People) and alcoholism (Pay No Attention to Alice). Haggard's Irma Jackson is a touching look at interracial love ("There's no way the world will understand that love is colorblind/ That's why Irma Jackson can't be mine"). Tanya Tucker sings I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again, about a harmonious new society of blacks and whites:

The Jacksons down the road were poor like we were

But our skin was white and theirs was black ...

A brand-new breeze is blowin' cross the southland,

And I see a brand-new kind of brotherhood.

In Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott, the Statler Brothers examine the plight of the movie-oriented family man who must plow through G, PG, R and, especially, X ratings:

Everybody's trying to make a comment

About our doubts and fears.

True Grit's the only movie

I've really understood in years.

You 've got to take your analyst along

To see if it's fit to see.

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott

Has happened to the industry.

Tom T. Hall writes from the wounded veteran's point of view in Mama, Bake a Pie (Daddy, Kill a Chicken):

Thank you, sir, and yes, sir,

It was worth it for the old red, white, and blue.

And since I won't be walking,

I suppose I'll save some money buying shoes.

One sign of country music's robust health is that it can now tolerate high jinks and a good spoofing. My Girl Bill is beginning to get considerable air play, and in it Jim Stafford raises the rare--for country, at least--specter of homosexuality before he eases out with a trick ending. Composer-Singer Martin Mull, who satirized rock in Dueling Tubas, turns to country in a new album called Normal. One song, Jesus Christ Football Star, pokes fun at Bible Belt anthems:

Satan used an outside kick,

Thank God that Matthew was thinking quick. . .

Backwoods Appeal. In the midst of country's booming supermarket of traditional goods and new brands, teaser displays and soaring profits, Merle Haggard stands virtually alone as a pure, proud and prominent link between country's past and present. He is not about to record with a couple of dozen violins to woo the easy-listening audience or hire a rock band to turn on the kids. Haggard has wide enough range and appeal already. Two of country's best-selling performers, Charley Pride and Charlie Rich, sing primarily heart songs. Tom T. Hall specializes in social commentary. Haggard does both, and more.

The only other country singer with Haggard's kind of versatility is Johnny Cash, 42, who unfortunately weakened his once authentic backwoods appeal with a series of network TV commercials for industrial America. Cash may restore some of his lost luster with a new single called Ragged Old Flag, which plays on America's patriotic wish to believe in itself, Watergate or no. Against the background of snare drums, banjos and a reverential chorus, Cash tells how the flag was shot up and torn at the Alamo and Chancellorsville, and then intones:

She waved from our ships upon the briny foam,

And now they ve about quit waving her back here at home...

And the Government for which she stands

Is scandalized throughout the land.

Merle Haggard has also played the embattled public patriot. To many Americans he is still most famous for his song Okie from Muskogee. It burst on the nation in 1969, when the hippies were beginning to lose their charm and hardhats and other members of the so-called silent majority were beginning to find more and more solace in the Nixon Administration.

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee,

And we don't take our trips on LSD

And we don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street,

But we like living right and being free

And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

A place where even squares can have a ball

We still wave Ol' Glory down at the courthouse

White lightning's still the biggest thrill of all.

Okie was the making of Haggard. The single sold 264,000 copies the first year, and the album of the same name 855,000. The song put Haggard into the millionaire class, which he did not mind. It also earned him a reputation as a spokesman for the right wing, which he did. Haggard is a patriot, all right, but his own kind: instinctive, apolitical. When George Wallace sent him a feeler asking him to campaign in the Alabama Governor's re-election campaign in 1970, Haggard refused.

He sang at the White House in March 1973, and was proud to stand in the reception line next to Richard Nixon. But only two months later, he had turned bitterly pessimistic about the Nixon Administration because of Watergate and other troubles he spotted around the country. By then, crisscrossing the U.S., Haggard had already found gas hard to buy at truck stops, found too many families hard put to feed themselves. Last fall, two months before the start of the auto-industry layoffs, he came out with a song annealed to the nation's mood. If We Make It Through December has already sold 468,000 copies and Haggard expects it to outsell Okie:

Got laid off down at the factory, and their timin's not the greatest in the world.

Heaven knows I've been working hard,

wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl.

That kind of complaint goes back at least as far as Woody Guthrie's eloquent pleas for the migratory workers during the Depression. Commercial country was born in the 1920s out of an amalgamation of American folk, British airs and hymns, and Negro gospel and blues. The New York record companies sent their men South to make wax discs of such performers as Samantha Bumgarner and Fiddlin' John Carson. Then they found the Carter Family, hillbilly virtuosos from Virginia, and the first idol of country, Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933). Country was off and running.

In the 1930s, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers made the singing cowboy a national hero. With the mobilization of the entire population in World War II, regional music styles began to meld. A languorous hybrid known as country-and-western was born, in which the still simple music of the Southeast was blended with the more sophisticated instrumentation (steel guitar, drums, even horns) of the Far West. This wedding of styles produced, among others, Merle Travis, Webb Pierce and the late Hank Williams. The rise of rock 'n' roll (notably Elvis Presley, who began his career singing country-and-western in Memphis) eclipsed country in the late 1950s. But by the late 1960s rock, the child of rock 'n' roll, was embracing country sounds.

Model Railroad. Today country-music stars may sing about riding the freights or drinking a brew, but many go home to antebellum mansions or $500,000 ranch houses, buy Cadillacs and keep houseboats around for the weekends. A trend now is toward private jets, but many country stars, Haggard included, prefer to own their own buses--huge $100,000 cruisers decked out with color TVs, recording equipment, separate quarters for star and band, sometimes even separate buses.

Up in the hills behind Bakersfield, Haggard has a $700,000 mansion surrounded by 180 acres of grassland and tan, windswept vistas. The property includes an electrified gate, a moat, a swimming pool and a barbecue pit of roughly bullring dimensions. Inside the house are enough walkie-talkies, mobile telephones, cameras, video-tape machines, tape recorders, amplifiers, speakers and other electronic gadgets to keep Haggard occupied for years. He is happiest, however, tinkering with his $50,000 model railroad: 250 freight cars, 35 locomotives and a scale replica of the Bakersfield terminal. Its main line is a kid's dream that runs through the living room, across the sun deck, through the sauna, a bathroom and a bedroom, and then out onto a trestle high above the rear patio.

Workin' Man. Life was not always that kind of a joyride for Merle Haggard, even if trains did always seem to play an important part. He was born April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield in a converted refrigerator car less than 100 yards from a heavily used Southern Pacific railroad main line. His father, who had brought the family West after fire destroyed their farm in Checotah, Okla., was a $40-a-week yardman. This and other highlights in Haggard's life are easy to trace in his songs.

Raised the son of a railroad man

Who rode 'em till he died.

I'd like to live like my daddy did,

But there's no more trains to ride.

Daddy died when Merle was nine, ending the ball games and the fishing trips and turning the boy into an aimless rebel.

The first thing I remember knowin'

was a lonesome whistle blowin',

And a youngon 's dream of growin' up to ride

on a freight train leavin' town,

not knowin' where I'm bound,

and no one could change my mind, but Mama tried.

While his mother Flossie was working as a $35-a-week bookkeeper, Merle was dropping out of the ninth grade to take any job he could find--pitching hay, sacking potatoes, roughnecking it on oil rigs. He had an easy sexuality, and the girls came around without his asking, just as the "snuff queens"--the country term for groupies--swarm around him at concerts now. At 16, he set up housekeeping in Eugene, Ore., with one of the girls. It lasted three months, and when it broke up, he went back to Bakersfield on a freight. And he ran into trouble with the law.

So I do life in prison for the wrongs I've done

But I pray every night for death to come

My life will be a burden every day

If I could die, my pain might go away.

Haggard ended up his stay in San Quentin as a model prisoner. He worked hard in the prison textile mill. "When I got out, they gave me $15 and a bus ticket home." Once back in Bakersfield, Merle dug ditches, and he sang.

I've been a workin 'man

Dang near all my life . . .

I'll drink my beer in a tavern,

Sing a little bit of these workin 'man blues.

Today the workin' man earns about $1 million annually. Haggard has an office, Hag. Inc., located across the street from the cemetery where his father is buried. But The Hag himself rarely is in the office. "As long as he's got a fishing boat and a pole, he couldn't care less about the business," says Bonnie. At home, Merle is a somewhat casual father of four children, but he is not at the mansion all that often either. "Maybe it's too fancy or something," says Bonnie. Whatever it is, Haggard tends to drop out of sight for days at a stretch, then calmly reappear. Aloof from all but a few friends, who predate his fame, and indifferent to publicity, Haggard would rather be jamming all night at J.D.'s, a small club in Ridgecrest in the Mojave Desert. Or gambling in Reno, where he dropped $80,000 two weeks ago. Or else engaged in his unending hunt for the perfect fishing hole.

When he vanishes upcountry, he is alone or with Bonnie or with his close friend and manager Fuzzy Owen. "After going into every city in America three or four times, after traveling every highway and eating at every truck stop, it gets old, and I gotta stop and recharge my batteries." His most recent recharge expedition--three days at Orange Lake, Fla., last month, angling for black bass without much luck--left him nostalgic. "I'd give all the money I have if I could go back to live in the '30s," he says. "I would like to have seen the Depression, see people sleep beside roads with no fear of being harmed, live in an age when a person could go to the back door to ask for a sandwich."

But, as Haggard well knows, a country singer must go forward, meeting and reflecting his public. Indeed, Haggard may still be belting it out in the 1990s, if the longevity of some of his older colleagues is any indication. Roy Acuff, dean of the Grand Ole Opry, is still going strong at 70. So are Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, at 62, and Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee Plowboy, at 55. "Country music fans are the most loyal there is," says Haggard. Besides, the open road, the one-night gigs, meeting people--all these make a way of life that Haggard would no more give up than he would casting for smallmouthed bass in a cold, clear, wilderness lake. As he puts it in Ev 'ry Fool Has a Rainbow...

He'll give up a bed of roses

for a hammock filled with thorns.

And go chasing after rainbows

Ev'ry time a dream is born.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.