A good singer can make a song sound nice, but a great singer can embody the lyrics so authentically that it seems like the words came straight from their innermost depths. But this, like so many other elements of performance art, is more often an illusion than a reality. Songwriting is an entire industry of its own, and historically speaking, a vast majority of popular records were written by someone other than the artist who sang them.
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Some artists start out as songwriters and become stars themselves, like Dolly Parton. Others opt to center their career on song interpretation, á la Linda Ronstadt. Johnny Cash was a country idol who did a little bit of both. Needless to say, Merle Haggard had a lot of different routes he could take when first starting his musical career.
When he was twelve years old, a small line of text at the bottom of his LP jacket helped point him in the right direction.
Merle Haggard Discovered What Songwriting Was As a Child
Merle Haggard bought into the same “whoever sang it, wrote it” illusion that most audiences do—until he was twelve. During a 1995 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, the country star recalled looking through old MGM records and noticing a name written underneath the artist in much smaller font. “It said ‘composer,’” Haggard explained. “And I didn’t know what a composer was. I asked my mother. She said, ‘I don’t know.’ And she called the record store, and they told her. That’s the writer. That’s the guy that writes the songs.”
“It seemed to me that it was very important to have your name in both places there,” Haggard continued. “I felt it was just as necessary to become a songwriter as it was to try to learn to play the guitar or—you know, it was certainly a tool that most people, I think, in the business would like to be a singer-songwriter, if they could be, because it is, in some way, your retirement. You can have a great career. And if you don’t write songs or have a publishing company or something to lean back on when it’s all over, it’s a pretty hard drop back to reality, you know?”
Merle Haggard Absorbed This Advice About Songwriting v. Singing
Speaking to Donald Gibson of Write On Music in 2010, Merle Haggard cited another moment where he knew that he was inclined to pursue the singer-songwriter route. “I think it’s a gift,” Haggard said. “I know in my conscience I can remember realizing that Johnny Mercer wrote ‘On The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe’. And I knew that Hank Williams either stole or wrote the songs that he claimed he wrote.”
(As a side note: Williams had a notorious reputation for writing songs and pitching them to fellow musicians. If enough people said they liked a track and wanted to cut it, Williams would rescind his offer and cut it himself, convinced that it was a worthwhile record. Just ask Little Jimmy Dickens.)
Haggard listed other notable songwriters as major influences, including Bob Dylan, Paul Anka, Hank Cochran, Fred Rose, and Tommy Dorsey. “Somebody said to me, ‘Merle, singers come and go, but writers live forever,’” Haggard recalled. That, paired with his first impressions of what a composer was when he was a kid, was enough for Haggard. He would boast a decades-long career full of successful original and cover songs alike, following in the footsteps of other country giants like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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