Throughout his career—and he kept working right until his death on April 6, 2016, a day that happened to be his 79th birthday—Merle Haggard tied the past to the present, and wound up pointing toward the future. Haggard's music existed in a continuum, not only through time but also through America's musical heritage. He never was merely a country artist. He took his cue from Bob Wills, the king of Western Swing, recognizing that nothing would get an audience dancing like hearing a little of all the sounds they loved.
At the height of his stardom in 1970, Haggard recorded a tribute album to Wills—he picked up the fiddle just a few weeks prior to recording, playing with enthusiasm, not skill—but his entire career can be seen as an enduring salute to Wills, a musician who saw no division between country, blues, jazz, and pop. Although Haggard could knock out a Texas Playboy shuffle with ease, he didn't simply replicate this sound; he adopted this sensibility as his own, adding an electrified twang endemic to his Bakersfield hometown and tempering this defiance with a fondness for folk.
Over the years, this hybrid would be dubbed Americana but even at the time, there were plenty of musicians who recognized its vitality. Gram Parsons, pioneer of the Cosmic American Music that dressed Merle's music in hippie clothes, wanted Haggard to produce his 1973 debut GP but Haggard passed, partially because he never was much for rock'n'roll, partially because the producer role never suited him. He wasn't a mentor, he was a maverick and an iconoclast, one who cherished community while stubbornly forging his own path. He drew from tradition but refused to live in the past, not even when he wondered "Are The Good Times Really Over," a 1981 hit released during his robust middle-age run.
By the early 1980s, Haggard's legacy was more or less cemented, yet he'd continue to add great songs to his canon—"Someday When Things Are Good," "Let's Chase Each Other Around The Room," "Kern River," "Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Star" were all around the corner—and that's a testament to his skills as a songwriter. He wrote like he performed: constantly, because it was his vocation and his pleasure. Such diligence can be seen in the clean, elegant lines of his songs; the lyrics are whittled down to just the words that linger in the mind. These are songs that simultaneously specific and open—"Mama Tried" feels like autobiography but the details don't precisely mirror Merle's own story—so they can be interpreted by any number of singers, which they have been. Parsons often tapped into the Haggard songbook, Bob Weir frequently hauled out "Mama Tried" in Grateful Dead sets, George Strait found salvation on "The Seashores of Old Mexico," and Johnny Paycheck recorded a whole album of them in 1981. Paycheck called his tribute Mr. Hag Told My Story, a play on "Someone Told My Story In A Song," a 1966 B-side where Haggard mythologized his own smash "Swinging Doors" from earlier that year.
Such an impish sense of humor contradicts the popular portrait of Merle Haggard, the workingman who found poetry in his hard life. There's a grain of truth in this—"Mama Tried," his best-known song and maybe his greatest, romanticized the time he spent in San Quentin serving time for an armed robbery—but it diminishes the art of one of America's greatest musicians. Take "Okie From Muskogee,” the 1969 anti-protest tune that may have been intended as satire by its author but was embraced as an anthem by Nixon's Silent Majority. Somehow, both interpretations were correct. Haggard may have delivered his lines with a sly smirk, but his yearning for earlier, innocent times was real, and this contradiction is what gives the song depth.
Indeed, one of the great pleasures of Haggard's art is his contradictions. He'd make a feint toward the right wing with "The Fightin' Side Of Me,” then write about an interracial romance in "Irma Jackson" with aching tenderness. A songwriter without peer, some of his greatest hits were written by others, including that career-making "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers"—a song so popular, he'd name his backing band after it. Where other singers swaggered like outlaws, Haggard was a genuine convict. He wasn't a fly-by-night rebel—he harbored instinctive distrust of the elite, whether that elite manifested as businessmen or long-haired collegiate protesters. There's a reason he wasn't part of the Highwaymen, the outlaw supergroup featuring Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. As great as that quartet is, each member had a specific persona that could be reduced to a cartoon. Haggard was far too complex a figure to be rendered as such.
This complexity means Merle Haggard can't be reduced to a shorthand: He's not the Man in Black or the Texan ambassador of marijuana. This richness is why Haggard's influence is so profound, his work so rewarding. For a singer who never had a true pop crossover—"If We Make It Through December" made it to 28 on the Hot 100 in 1974, an achievement that seems all the more remarkable because it bears no traces of AM-radio pandering—he nevertheless moulded the shape of modern music, not simply by providing the blueprint for country rock, but by breaking down borders separating genre, race, class, and age. And the latter might be one of his least recognized achievements.
At every phase of his 50-year career, Haggard never acted like he was younger than he was; he got older in public without any sign of embarrassment. That's not to say that he never cut a bad record or gave a bad show, but he learned how to adapt, playing with phrases of songs he's played countless times, delivering them differently at the age of 35 than he did at 70, when he was still playing as many shows as he could withstand at that age. Throughout out it all, Haggard never lost sight of who he was, so looking back through his monumental career, it seems both consistent and ever-changing, like life itself.