Why Vince Gill Once Had “One of the Greatest Nights” of His Life at a Beer Joint—and the Song It Later Inspired

This writer loves a scuzzy, smoky beer joint as much as the next guy, but it’s not necessarily the place most of us would associate with the best nights of our lives. (Most debaucherous or low-down or rowdy, perhaps.) However, one of those old beer joints was precisely where Vince Gill found himself when he had what would become one of the most significant moments in his life, both as a music fan and a professional player, that would inspire a bittersweet song years later in 2019.

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The brief moment developed into a lifelong connection that would later inform a heartbreaking song Gill wrote in 2019 about the man he walked into that fateful dive bar to meet.

Vince Gill Describes One of the Greatest Nights of His Life

Long before he would achieve chart-topping success of his own, Vince Gill was cutting his teeth as a backing musician for country greats like Emmylou Harris. One fateful night in 1981, Gill had just finished his set with Harris when he heard that Merle Haggard was close by that night performing a show on his honky tonk tour. “He was playing beer joints across the country,” Gill explained in a 2016 interview with Southern Living. Gill told Harris, and shortly after, the two musicians and the rest of their band piled into two limousines and headed to the honky tonk.

“It was one of the greatest nights of my life,” Gill said a few years later in an interview with CBS Mornings. After Haggard’s set, Harris took Gill to the country singer’s tour bus to meet him for the first time. “She said, ‘This is one you need to know about, Merle, this kid’s got the goods. He’s the real deal. His name’s Vince Gill.’ Merle said, ‘I know who he is. He’s that boy that wrote the song’s Leona’s got out.’ So, he knew who I was. It was awesome.” Merle Haggard was married to Leona Williams from 1978 to 1983, during which time Williams cut one of Gill’s songs.

After that early 1980s meeting, Gill’s star only continued to rise. He became a best-selling country artist by the mid-1990s, placing him on a more collaborative playing field with his hero, Haggard. Gill and Haggard worked and performed together multiple times over the years, with Gill musing that in the last years of Haggard’s life, “We got to be really close. I think he got to know how much I really revered him.”

The Song That the Country Star Wrote About His Idol

Merle Haggard’s death in 2016 sent shockwaves through the country music world, and that included Vince Gill. During his appearance on CBS Mornings, Gill recalled, “The morning he died, I just sat down and wrote that song. That’s how I grieve. That’s where I go. I go to music for grief. It’s cheaper than therapy,” he said with a laugh.

The song he wrote that morning, “A World Without Haggard”, closes Gill’s 15th studio album, Okie. Gill used Haggard’s songwriting ethos of prioritizing the truth above all else throughout the entire album, the name of which pays homage to Gill’s musical hero, the original Okie from Muskogee.

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