Merle Haggard: The Outlaw - Rolling Stone. It all came from that evening, in spring 1. Merle Haggard was nine. He had been at a Church of Christ prayer meeting outside Bakersfield, California, with his mother, Flossie. ![]()
The young boy didn't like church. This night he meant to race home, where he knew his father, James Haggard – a genial man who had once taken his son by the hand and led him to a friend's house to pick out a fox terrier that the boy named Jack – would be waiting. Merle jumped across the railroad tracks on the way to the family's boxcar home, ahead of his mother. I tried to ignore a chill I felt coming up my back.. The light was out in the front room, and I could see only one little light at the back of the house.. I could see tears running down his cheeks. I'd never seen my Daddy cry before. The Outlaw Josey Wales is a 1976 American revisionist Western DeLuxe Color and Panavision film set during and after the American Civil War. It was directed by and. Spinner is Hurting & Beardo Plays alot of NEW Stuff. Gonzalo Bergara - No More from Zalo's Blues 2016 (3:01) Lew Jetton & 61 South - Who's Texting. He had managed to steer the car home and get himself into the chair. When the family took James to the hospital after his stroke, he reached out in the car to his son and touched him gently. Merle was present during check- in, when James suffered a brain hemorrhage. Days later, he was hit with another, which killed him. It was a transformative loss for Merle, the central event of his life. Haggard, still a child, ran away and lived as a rebel from that season forward – his home no longer held meaning or comfort for him. His rebellion turned into lawbreaking, until he saw other men die, or lose their souls irretrievably, along that same path. He turned to the dream that his father longed for – making music – but had never felt free to pursue. Haggard thrived at it, as if redeeming a heritage. From the start, he commanded attention with his voice. In contrast to Hank Williams' nervy drawl or Johnny Cash's rough- hewn, colloquial way of sharing predicaments, Haggard began with an impossibly beautiful voice. His brandy- toned, barroom plea could glide up a scale fluidly, without any discernible steps; it was a prodigy's feat, like Frank Sinatra's young mellifluence or Jim Reeves' plaintive Western croon. Haggard's voice yielded hard truths – songs about hearts lost in alcohol's shadow, men who couldn't find honest support and lived outside the law. Though his audience didn't know it for years, he was often singing about himself. Of all the country artists who bore or brandished an outlaw image, Haggard had come up against that life, and paid for it. That authenticity helped make him one of the most revered singers and songwriters that country music ever delivered. By the end of his life, 3. Billboard's country- music top 1. Number One. He also had 3. ![]() ![]() Number One singles. Some, though – most famously, . He'd arrive at truths – or at love – only to question those verities. He could even seem diffident about his voice, perhaps country's greatest vocal instrument. He rested on nothing; he knew a deeper rest and certainty were coming. And it will be till the day I die. He meant it as a way of identifying with, and standing for, endangered values, as America was in a social ferment that divided generations, regions, political convictions and ways of living. To Jack's 'MIDI Music' Bluegrass, Cajun, Country, Western & USA Folk MIDI Files The T's - Page 1 Please Click Your Refresh Or Reload Button If.New things were in the air – drug use and youth revolt. The audience Haggard was speaking to saw this change as a threat, as an alien incursion that filled the streets and headlines, that derided patriotism and long- held common notions of decency. Haggard's imagery seemed hackneyed – . They were all called Okies when they flooded into the western United States – a place that wanted no part of them. The disdain and occasional violence they met with was dramatized by John Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Haggard was a part of that heritage, though his family never saw themselves as people in flight. His parents ran a successful- enough farm around Checotah, Oklahoma, 2. Muskogee, but after a mysterious fire – suspected as arson – destroyed their barn, they moved with their two children, Lowell and Lillian, to the Bakersfield region of Southern California. The Haggards, like other Okie emigrants, weren't welcome in Bakersfield itself. Instead, they located in a migrant settlement, Oildale, near the Kern River – not in a shantytown, but in a railroad boxcar that James adapted into a mobile home. Merle Haggard was born on April 6th, 1. His father wasn't sure the family should stay in California, but Flossie wouldn't hear of leaving. My mother was a more serious- type person, given to worry when there was little to worry about. I got to thinking that he must have dreams he was letting go by and I knew he had great love for music, but he didn't seem to work at it much. She didn't approve of musicians who played for such purposes, and reformed James to fit her beliefs. In California, he became a carpenter for the Santa Fe railroad. Seven- year- old Merle with his father, James, in 1. Courtesy of the Haggard Family. Merle, like his father, loved music – as a small child, he would insist on hearing a daily country program on the radio. By early adolescence, he had already identified his musical touchstones – the early- 2. Father of Country Music, Jimmie Rodgers; Western swing musician, songwriter and bandleader Bob Wills; singer- songwriter Hank Williams, who died at age 2. Cadillac en route to a New Year's Day show in 1. Lefty Frizzell. Flossie recognized her son's interest in music, but she wanted to steer it to something respectable. She got Merle violin lessons in the first grade – but he didn't want to learn violin. He wanted to play fiddle, like his father, without formal training. He had a natural aptitude for it, his sister, Lillian, told The New Yorker in 1. I think he got his first guitar when he was around 1. After James' death, Flossie took work as a bookkeeper, and Merle became, as Lillian described him, . Merle needed what they call now 'after- death counseling.' He felt he was to blame for his dad's death. He felt he was a burden to his mother. He was always ornery.. There had never been any wild children in the family, no previous pattern of independent behavior, so the bull was out of the barn before anyone recognized it. I was determined not to spend my life in some set pattern. At age 1. 0, he and a friend loaded pillowcases with food and hopped a freight car, as so many Dust Bowl . They didn't get far; a train- yard officer found them along the tracks in Fresno, California. The flight troubled Merle's mother – why didn't he use his father's train pass? She wanted her son to stay at home and in school – he was too young for such a dangerous escapade. But even though he was a child, Merle had eyed the horizon; he would run at that horizon over and over, harder and harder, until 1. Haggard's exploits and rebellion grew bigger and more exciting, and more foolish and dangerous. As a child, he behaved like a street- wise adult. In 1. 95. 1, at 1. Merle and his friend Bob Teague ventured to see Lefty Frizzell in concert at the Rainbow Gardens in Bakersfield, but both got so drunk they passed out and missed the first set. They had also purchased a pistol and a switchblade, and on their way home, they were arrested and spent five days in jail. In Modesto, California, the teenage Haggard played guitar one night in a club for beer. He and a friend also visited a brothel in Amarillo, Texas. He bought new boots for the occasion. He escaped from many of them, only to eventually get apprehended again. He and others were beaten or punished heartlessly by guards, and one night, a boy sleeping in a bunk next to him was knifed. Hell, people were after me, running me down like I was a criminal. Another time, in Oildale, during an attempted robbery, he and a friend badly beat a young man who others had taunted as . Was I going to become like those goddamned people I'd hated so bad? Worse, I felt guilty. He was 1. 9, she was around 1. Lowell, and his wife. It could've been a critical moment; Haggard started to play in clubs during this time, and became an increasingly skillful singer. But their relationship turned ugly. She says God must have wanted to punish us both for some terrible event, so He gave us each other. To my face, it was always a different story. She was always making fun.. She just laughed and told him she had better things to do. When he went on the run – or ended up in jail, as he did for nine months after stealing a car – he didn't leave means of support for Leona. He missed the delivery of their first child, Dana, during that stretch. Shortly thereafter, he robbed a gas station where he had once worked and headed out to New Mexico to seek work in the oil fields, but there were no jobs and Haggard returned home. The losses were quickly adding up for a young life. He was promptly caught – and almost just as promptly escaped, walking out of the jail unnoticed the next morning. Local police were through with Haggard; they issued a shoot- on- sight order. He was rearrested and spent two months in a minimum- security prison while California decided what to do with him. When a guard slipped Haggard's new prison assignment through the bars of his cell, he stared in disbelief at the order. Haggard arrived there in February 1. Not knowing whether he would be there for months or years was a torment. He witnessed things at San Quentin that forever haunted him: . Some times when I lay in my bunk, I could hear men crying out in pain from being raped by other inmates. Chessman was the most famous man on death row in America. In May 1. 94. 8, he had been convicted of robbery, kidnapping and rape, and sentenced to death – the first convict in America to receive the death penalty for a nonlethal kidnapping. Haggard recalled that on the night before Chessman's execution by cyanide gas on May 2nd, 1. The men said very little. It was so quiet it was scary.. We could hear people singing hymns out on the hillside. Between the songs we could hear prayers. Kendrick had told Merle, . You can be somebody someday. He later turned the memories into the opening lines of his finest song, . He also saw Johnny Cash play at San Quentin on a New Year's Day. David Allan Coe Bio. CMTCountry. A life- long renegade, singer/songwriter David Allan Coe was one of the most colorful and unpredictable characters in country music history. One of the pioneering artists of the outlaw country movement of the '7. Top Ten - - but he was among the biggest cult figures in country music throughout his career. As a result, he was sent to reform school. For the next 2. 0 years, he never spent more than a handful of months outside of a correctional facility - - he spent much of his twenties in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Released from prison in 1. Coe went straight for Nashville, where he lived in a hearse that he parked in front of the old Ryman Auditorium, the home of the Grand Ole Opry. Although he didn't conform to Nashville's professional standards, he soon gained the attention of the independent label Plantation Records, which released his debut album, Penitentiary Blues, in 1. Followed within a year by a second volume, all of the songs on these albums were based on his prison experiences. Soon, he began performing in a rhinestone suit given to him by Mel Tillis, as well as a Lone Ranger mask, and began calling himself the . He cultivated a large cult following with his act, but he couldn't break into the mainstream. However, other artists found success with his songs - - in 1. Billie Jo Spears had a minor hit with his . Although a string of moderate hits followed, he rarely cracked the country Top 4. Johnny Paycheck took Coe's . During his 1. 3- year association with Columbia, Coe released 2. For the Record: The First 1. Years (1. 98. 4), 1. Son of the South (featuring Willie, Waylon, Jessi Colter, and other . The conservative Nashville music industry frequently snubbed him and he had tax problems with the IRS; at one time, they seized his Key West home, and he went to live in a Tennessee cave until he got back on his feet. Toward the end of the '8. Coe remarried and began to settle down. Throughout the '9. America and Europe. In addition to his musical career, he also acted in a few movies, including The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James. He also published a novel, Psychopath, and an autobiography. The LP Recommended for Airplay was issued in 1. The new millennium saw the release of Long Haired Country Boy in 2. Songwriter of the Tear appeared on Cleveland the following year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |