Dear Merle,

I left messages for you on your management’s answering machine and sent an e-mail requesting an interview, but no one answered them.

You’re scheduled to play Harrah’s in Cherokee on June 1 and I wanted to talk to you for a preview story. But that’s O.K. I don’t know about this tracking down of stars thing, anyway. At 64, you’ve probably been tired of interviewers for years, asking the same old boring questions, and having to give the same old tired answers.

I won’t be going to the Harrah’s show. My wife and I are saving for a visit to see family in New Orleans, and $35 and more a ticket is a bit steep for the working people you sing about. Still, I was hoping we could hook up so I could personally tell you a huge thank you for all the great music. You and I go back a ways, hoss.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know your name, but I think what steered me permanently in your direction was a 1976 interview with Lynyrd Skynyrd on an Atlanta rock station. The deejay asked singer-songwriter Ronnie Van Zant to name his greatest musical influence. He answered without hesitation: “Merle Haggard.”

Back then, as a teenager in an Atlanta high school, I took Van Zant’s word as the gospel truth. If you were good enough for him, you were good enough for me.

During the summers I would work factory and warehouse jobs, and many of my fellow employees were ex-convicts working through a temporary agency. They talked a lot about prison life, and when our conversations turned to music, your name always popped up. They saw you as an inspiration because of your prison record.

Your wild youth screeched to a halt in 1957 when you were sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in San Quentin for robbery. After your release in 1960, you didn’t succumb to factory life. You picked up a guitar and a pen.

Those warehouse jobs allowed me to occasionally buy records. One of them was “Same Train, Different Time,” your tribute to Jimmie Rodgers. I still have that record, in all its worn-out, warped, vinyl glory. Rocker friends would call me a redneck for playing that album, but they missed the point. That album gushed attitude that rockers couldn’t touch, especially “California Blues” and all those songs about freight hopping, rambling and restlessness. I envied the characters in your songs who could just pick up and go anywhere at a moment’s notice.

That reminds me, Merle. We’ve both got railroad men in our families. Your father was not only a railroad man, he converted a boxcar into a house, just 300 feet from the Santa Fe Southern Pacific line in Oildale, California. You grew up in the constant sight and sound of moving freight.

My grandfather retired from Southern Railway. He worked the yard in New Orleans, and some of my earliest memories include my grandfather, holding his lunchpail and standing in the door of an open boxcar, jauntily swinging off the train as it creaked to a stop. In my impressionable young mind, my grandfather had the coolest job in the world.

Your train songs might have contributed to the spring night in 1987, when for reasons that are still unclear, I hopped aboard a Burlington Northern freight train.

I was in Helena, Mont. in a bar I didn’t care for. It was about midnight, and I was bored and didn’t want to wait until the next afternoon for my hungover friends to drive me back to Missoula. The bar was adjacent to a freightyard. I told my friends I would just take a train home and walked outside to pick one out. I left my coat in the bar (a mistake) with my friends’ stares of disbelief and I climbed into an idling engine and waited.

Once it pulled out, I didn’t care where it was going. That feeling of not knowing my destination was one of the most exhilarating moments I have ever experienced.

Fortunately, I got caught. If that big brakeman hadn’t spotted me, I might have frozen to death. Instead of throwing me off, he put me on board a heated engine behind the lead engine. I guess the engineer never knew I was there. The brakeman told me to stay low and jump off in Missoula .

Merle, you should have seen that sunrise I caught from that train as it rolled through the chilly Rockies on that Sunday morning. When the train finally stopped well past Missoula, I jumped off and walked home. I was greasy, filthy, tired and freezing without my coat. It was a long walk home. I noticed the stares from people on their way to church. Dirty bum, they probably thought.

That reminds me of something I have noticed about your songs, Merle. You write from the perspective of people at the bottom: folks in government labor camps, prisons, hobo jungles, burned-out wasted farms and dust bowl disasters. But when you sing, your diction is precise, clear and articulate, not what you might expect from these characters. We have prejudged them according to their status in life, but you force us to change our outlook when we hear them speak.

Your songs lend dignity to the outcasts, which puts them in a league with the Dust Bowl photographs of Dorothea Dietz, the Alabama sharecropper snapshots of Walker Evans and The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. I see you as John Steinbeck with a Fender Telecaster. You both explored the California myth and described people who took it on their chins their entire lives.

Your songs seemed more vivid when I was living out West. Something about the vastness of the land emphasized the distance between people, and I noticed that Montana had become a dumping ground for those who didn’t complete their western journey.

In the late 1980s, as a University of Montana student, I frequented a bar in Missoula called Luke’s, a small joint built entirely from used parts. I went there more than any other bar because it was safe. It was a regular hangout of the Bandidios biker gang, which meant it had less fights than in other places. A guy named Erik “Fingers” Ray, who played Luke’s all the time, had an extensive repertoire of classic country songs, and the one the Bandidos requested the most was your first number one hit, “The Fugitive.” When Erik played it, the entire bar would shut up and pay attention, and the tiny dance floor would fill with slow dancing couples. Everyone seemed to understand that song. “I raised a lot of cane back in my younger days/While mama used to pray my crops would fail/Now I’m a hunted fugitive with just two ways/outrun the law or spend my life in jail.”

But I haven’t always understood you, Merle. I listen to “Sing Me Back Home,” about a death row inmate walking his final mile to his execution. He has nostalgic memories of home, and we should feel sorry for him (and we do), but you never bring up his innocence or guilt, or what crime he might have committed. You just look at him as a man. Hell, he was probably guilty. But I guess we can’t blame his home life for how he turned out if he wants to go back to it so badly. What happened along the way?
I also have to question your political stance. Back in 1970, you released “Okie from Muskogee,” and “the Fightin’ Side of Me,” where you seem to praise Richard Nixon and his silent majority and everything they stood for: “I read about some squirrely guy who says he just don’t believe in fightin’/And I wonder just how long the rest of us can count on being free/They love our milk and honey but they preach about some other way of livin’/When they’re runnin’ down our country, man, they’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”

Yeah, I know, you met Nixon and he knew the names of your entire entourage, and Ronald Reagan would be the guy to grant you a full pardon, but I think you are aware of enough injustice in this world to question the priorities of our leaders. I’ve always been a little uneasy with your flag-waving stance during the Vietnam War. But I think you were more liberal then than you let on.

I don’t understand why one of your songs doesn’t get the attention it should. I’m guessing that “Irma Jackson” was the first country song to address interracial romance, and it wouldn’t be played on today’s country radio: “I’d love to shout my feelings from a mountain way up high/And tell the world I love her and I will till I die/There’s no way the world will understand that love is color-blind/That’s why Irma Jackson can’t be mine.”

I should tell you that my favorite song of yours is “If We Make it Through December.” In my younger days, I would have said that “Ramblin’ Fever’ was my favorite, but the responsibilities of adulthood and fatherhood kicked in long ago. I’m not in the desperate straits of the characters in that song, but I am more aware of saving pennies and planning ahead and having dreams that may or may not come true. Sadly, I think many relate to that song: “I don’t mean to hate December/It’s meant to be the happy time of year/And my little girl don’t understand/Why Daddy can’t afford no Christmas here.”

But it’s not just your skill at observing everyone else that astounds me. You can look inside yourself and see a person that, frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to know: “You give me no reason for my drinking/But I can’t stand myself at times/But you’re better off to just leave and forget me/Cause I can’t hold myself in line.” The crevasses in your face tell us the reality of those words.

I think the most honest song you ever wrote was “Footlights,” a slap in the face to the whole “Howdy friends and neighbors” image of country music. There must have been many nights when the last place you wanted to be was on that stage and those damn lights and all those faces out there staring at you and then it’s back on the bus and ride all night and do it all over again: “I throw my old guitar across the stage and the bass man takes the ball/And the crowd goes nearly wild to see my guitar nearly fall/After 20 years of pickin’ we’re alive and kickin’ down some walls/But tonight I’ll kick the footlights out and walk away without a curtain call.”

Honesty. It’s what separates you from today’s revolving door of country stars, the boring, no-talent jerks who offer no more than good looks and tight jeans. I don’t listen to today’s country music, but I do admire great writers. You’re one of the greatest. Keep up the good work.

Your fan,

Karl Rohr

 

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