Merle Haggard on the Tragedy That Informed His Life and Career: “Things Would Have Been Different, Maybe Better”

Before there was the outlaw country movement, there was Merle Haggard, a California transplant via Oklahoma who spent his teen years in and out of juvenile detention centers for forging checks, robbery, truancy, and petty larceny. The “Okie from Muskogee” singer traced this sense of waywardness back to one pivotal moment: the death of his father, James Haggard.

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In May 2016, one month after the country icon died, Rolling Stone published a feature on Merle that included his recollection of discovering his father sitting at home, having just suffered a stroke. “Before I even got to the yard, I could tell something was wrong. I tried to ignore a chill I felt coming up my back. Then I saw him. He was sitting in the shadows in the big chair. I could see tears running down his cheeks. I’d never seen my Daddy cry before.” James had a stroke while driving and managed to make it the rest of the way home. But his health failed quickly after that.

James suffered two brain hemorrhages following his stroke, the second of which killed him. “Something went out of my world that I was never able to replace,” Merle later said. “I began to realize that things would have been different, maybe better, if he’d lived.” It’s impossible to know what might have happened had James died on a different day from a different cause. Nevertheless, the loss of Merle’s father deeply affected every part of his life from then on, for better or worse. And as a teenager without a paternal influence, that often shook out to be worse. 

Merle Haggard Losing His Father Informed Virtually Every Part of His Life Moving Forward

After Merle Haggard’s father died, his mother had to start pulling longer hours to support the family. With plenty of unsupervised time and an angst that only a child who lost a parent too young can feel, Haggard started acting out in and outside of school. These reckless antics landed him in juvenile detention centers until he was of age to be sent to actual prison, which he was. (In fact, Haggard was in the audience of inmates for whom Johnny Cash performed in San Quentin.)

Haggard had already begun playing local nightclubs before his stint in prison, and after he was released from San Quentin in 1960, he picked back up where he left off. By 1966, he landed his first No. 1 hit with “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive”. Haggard was a bona fide country legend by the following decade, having finally achieved the dream that his late father had always wanted but could never pursue while providing for his family.

Still, Haggard never quite got over his loss. “There are times now when it’s hard to remember the exact sound of his voice, but his face is as clear in my mind as it ever was,” he later said of his father. “Sometimes, it’s like he never left me at all. I’m no longer feeling that anger I used to feel because he’d left me.”

Anger, no, but general discomfort, yes. “There is a restlessness in my soul that I’ve never conquered, not with motion, marriages, or meaning,” Haggard said. “[It’s] still there to a degree. And it will be till the day I die.”

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images