Biography
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 as bleak there and Haggard himself was born in a converted boxcar. His father, who worked on the Santa Fe railway, died of a stroke when Haggard was nine. Many of Haggard’s songs are about those early years: ‘Mama’s Hungry Eyes’, ‘California Cottonfields’, ‘They’re Tearin’ The Labour Camps Down’ and ‘The Way It Was In ’51’. Haggard became a tearaway who, despite the efforts of his Christian mother (‘Mama Tried’), spent many years in reform schools. When only 17, he married a waitress and they had four children during their...
Read the Full Biography of Merle Haggard / Willie Nelson
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