Merle Haggard › Similar Artists

George Jones - 100% match to Merle Haggard

George Glenn Jones, 12 September 1931, Saratoga, Texas, USA. Jones is the greatest of honky tonk singers but he has also been a victim of its lifestyle. He learned guitar in his youth, and in 1947, was hired by the husband-and-wife duo Eddie And Pearl. This developed into his own radio programme and a fellow disc jockey, noting his close-set eyes and upturned nose, nicknamed Read more

Waylon Jennings - 96% match to Merle Haggard

Wayland Arnold Jennings, 15 June 1937, Littlefield, Texas, USA, d. 13 February 2002, Arizona, USA. Jennings’ mother wanted to name him Tommy but his father, William Alvin, insisted that the family tradition of ‘W.A.’ should be maintained. His father played guitar in Texas dancehalls and Jennings’ childhood hero was Ernest Tubb, with whom he later recorded Read more

Merle Haggard & the Strangers - 94% match to Merle Haggard

6 April 1937, Bakersfield, California, USA. ‘Like a razor’s edge, Merle Haggard sings’ is how John Stewart described his voice in ‘Eighteen Wheels’, and that razor has been honed by his rough and rowdy ways. In the 30s Haggard’s parents migrated from the Dustbowl to ‘the land of milk and honey’, California. Life, however, was almost a Read more

Buck Owens - 70% match to Merle Haggard

Alvis Edgar Owens Jnr., 12 August 1929, Sherman, Texas, USA, d. 25 March 2006, USA, Bakersfield, California, USA. Buck Owens became one of the leading country music stars of the 60s and 70s, along with Merle Haggard, the leading exponent of the ‘west coast sound’. Owens gave himself the nickname Buck at the age of three, after a favourite horse. When he was 10, his Read more

Hank Williams Jr. - 66% match to Merle Haggard

Johnny Paycheck - 63% match to Merle Haggard

Donald Eugene Lytle, 31 May 1938, Greenfield, Ohio, USA, d. 18 February 2003, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. His date of birth is often disputed, and varies between 1938 and 1941. The title of Paycheck’s 1977 country hit, ‘I’m The Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised)’, is apt as he was in trouble throughout his life; the wild eyes on his album sleeves give the pictur Read more

Dwight Yoakam - 61% match to Merle Haggard

23 October 1956, Pikeville, Kentucky, USA. Much of Yoakam’s hip honky tonk music paved the way for rock audiences accepting country music in the 90s. A singer-songwriter with an early love of the honky-tonk country music of Buck Owens and Lefty Frizzell, he has always shown a distinct antipathy towards the Nashville pop/country scene.Yoakam, the Read more

David Allan Coe - 57% match to Merle Haggard

6 September 1939, Akron, Ohio, USA. From the age of nine, Coe was in and out of reform schools, correction centres and prisons. According to his publicity handout, he spent time on Death Row after killing a fellow inmate who demanded oral sex. When Rolling Stone magazine questioned this, Coe responded with a song, ‘I’d Like To Kick The Shit Out Of You’. Whatev Read more

Willie Nelson - 57% match to Merle Haggard

Willie Hugh Nelson, 30 April 1933, Abbott, Texas, USA. Following their mother’s desertion and the death of their father, Nelson and his sister Bobbie were raised by their grandparents. Bobbie was encouraged to play the piano and Willie the guitar. By the age of seven he was writing cheating-heart-style songs. ‘Maybe I got ’em from soap operas on the radio,
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Tom T. Hall - 52% match to Merle Haggard

25 May 1936, Olive Hill, Kentucky, USA. Hall was one of eight children and his father was a bricklayer and part-time minister. Hall described the family home as ‘a frame house of pale-grey boards and a porch from which to view the dusty road and the promise of elsewhere beyond the hills - the birthplace of a dreamer’. Hall, who started to learn to play a school fri Read more

Conway Twitty - 47% match to Merle Haggard

Harold Lloyd Jenkins, 1 September 1933, Friars Point, Mississippi, USA, d. 5 June 1993, Springfield, Missouri, USA. His father, a riverboat pilot, named him after a silent-film comedian and gave him a guitar when he was five years old. The family moved to Helena, Arkansas, and Twitty’s schoolboy friends - Jack Nance, Joe E. Lewis and John Hughey - have since played in h Read more

Charley Pride - 45% match to Merle Haggard

18 March 1938, Sledge, Mississippi, USA. Charley Pride was born on a cotton farm, which, as a result of his success, he was later able to purchase. Pride says, ‘My dad named me Charl Frank Pride, but I was born in the country and the midwife wrote it down as Charley’. Harold Dorman, who wrote and recorded ‘Mountain of Love’, also hails from Sledge and wro Read more

Lefty Frizzell - 43% match to Merle Haggard

William Orville Frizzell, 31 March 1928, Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas, USA, d. 19 July 1975, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The eldest of eight children of an itinerant oilfield worker, Frizzell was raised mainly in El Dorado, Arkansas, but also lived in sundry places in Texas and Oklahoma. Greatly influenced by his parents’ old 78s of Jimmie Rodgers, he sang as a young Read more

Ernest Tubb - 42% match to Merle Haggard

Ernest Dale Tubb, 9 February 1914, near Crisp, Ellis County, Texas, USA, d. 6 September 1984, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Ernest was the youngest of five children of Calvin Tubb, the foreman of a 300-acre cotton farm, and his wife Sarah. In 1920 the family relocated to Benjamin, and then moved again, to Kemp, in 1925. The following year, his parents divorced and initially he Read more

Kris Kristofferson - 41% match to Merle Haggard

Kristoffer Kristofferson, 22 June 1936, Brownsville, Texas, USA. Kristofferson, a key figure in the ‘New Nashville’ country movement of the early 70s, began his singing career in Europe. Previously a Golden Gloves boxer and a Creative Literature student at Ponoma College in California, Kristofferson earned a Rhodes scholarship to study literature at Oxford Universi Read more