Latest Release
- 3 MAY 2024
- 12 Songs
- Pancho & Lefty · 1983
- Big City · 1981
- 20 Greatest Hits · 1968
- 20 Greatest Hits · 2001
- 20 Greatest Hits · 1994
- 20 Greatest Hits · 2002
- 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Merle Haggard · 2000
- 20 Greatest Hits · 1974
- 20 Greatest Hits · 1967
- The Best of the Best of Merle Haggard · 1969
Essential Albums
- The story goes that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard were making an album in Nelson’s home studio outside Austin, Texas, when Nelson got a call from his daughter Lana. She told him he really needed to hear this song called “Pancho & Lefty”, by a somewhat obscure Austin writer named Townes Van Zandt. Nelson obliged, and found the story of a complex friendship between two elusive men so fitting to him and Haggard, that he walked outside to the bus where Haggard was sleeping, and told him to get up so they could sing it. Haggard’s response: It’s a good song—but it can wait until morning. But the band’s already in the studio, Nelson said. They’re rehearsing. In the finished track, you can hear the hard-bitten machismo that fueled the cowboy myth, as well as a tenderness—between two men, no less—that felt both reflective and unresolved. The singers had always been foils for each other, at least when it came to temperament: Haggard was flippant when he wasn’t being deeply, sometimes melodramatically sincere, while Nelson tended to be mellower but also more averse to conflict. Nelson was the lover; Haggard, the fighter. But they were both heading toward their fifties, with plenty of life experience behind them. As a result, the 1983 album Pancho & Lefty—produced with some airy touches by Chips Moman, during what were effectively the same sessions as Nelson’s Always on My Mind—is partly a look at what it might feel like to be an American man firmly in middle age. Throughout the album, the duo are cranky but responsible (“Reasons to Quit” is followed by “No Reason to Quit”), entitled to the point of self-pity (“All the Soft Places to Fall”, “Opportunity to Cry”) and sentimental without giving in to the false sense of wisdom, or sense of conclusion, that might’ve seduced them in the past (“Pancho and Lefty”). Calling this album a bromance is too flip, while describing it as a buddy comedy would be too disrespectful, given the album’s mystery. It’s simply the sound of two men singing as friends, with all the complexity the word ultimately implies.
- After the run he had in the 1960s and 1970s, it would’ve been enough for Merle Haggard to excuse himself and retire. Not only was 1981’s Big City his fourth album in a year and a half, it turned out to be one of the best of Haggard’s five-decade career. The convicts and sinners that dominated his early music had settled down, but still found themselves fundamentally at odds with the world, which they found too fast (“Stop the World and Let Me Off”), too dirty (“Big City”) and too generally devoid of heart (“Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver)”). Were they cranky? Yes—at times, Big City sounds like a catalogue of grievances issued by a committee of stubborn uncles. But like stubborn uncles, there’s something lovable about them. Or, if not lovable, at least laughable. Really, what else can you do with someone who takes a moral stance against highways (“Good Old American Guest”)? And while it might not soften you to learn that these Big City dwellers spend most of their time reliving the past (“My Favorite Memory”, “I Always Get Lucky With You”), it might give you a clue into where they’re coming from. The cliché when it came to someone as successful as Haggard is that, by the early 1980s, he’d have nowhere to go but down. With Big City, Haggard and his characters found another way: forward.
Artist Playlists
- Tales of life on the edge from a legendary country music maverick.
- The outlaw's legendary tunes made anew.
- 2004
About Merle Haggard
Raised in Bakersfield, California in 1937 by migrant parents from Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma, Merle Haggard became arguably the most important country singer to surface in the 1960s, scoring an astonishing 38 No. 1 country hits between 1966 and 1987 while changing the genre’s sound and exerting profound influence over the emergence of country rock. Haggard spent his youth committing minor offences and enduring spells in juvenile detention, winding up at San Quentin Prison in 1958 after attempting to escape from Bakersfield Jail, where he’d been imprisoned for attempted robbery. Upon his parole in 1960, he chipped away at the local circuit, which had made stars of Buck Owens and Wynn Stewart, and gained attention for a hardcore honky-tonk sound that stood in opposition to the increasingly slick sound of Nashville. In the mid-’60s he began scoring hits, and as he became a star, he turned his attention to writing his own songs, drawing heavily and poetically from his checkered past with unflinching sobriety. He made tribute records to his heroes Jimmie Rodgers and Western swing star Bob Wills—sparking a revival of the latter’s style—and his 1969 hit “Okie from Muskogee” wryly mocked the counterculture at the height of the Vietnam War, establishing a contrarian if sometimes fluid mindset, a quality artificially stoked by his label’s decision to follow the single’s release with another reactionary tune, “The Fightin’ Side of Me”. Haggard’s sound expanded to incorporate elements of jazz, blues and folk, and his lyrics resonated with working-class listeners who recognised their own struggles in his narratives in “Workin’ Man Blues” and “If We Make It Through December”. At the turn of the century, he reached a new audience with stripped-down recordings—especially If I Could Only Fly in 2000—that summoned his vintage sound, and he continued working until his death in April 2016.
- HOMETOWN
- Oildale, CA, United States
- BORN
- 6 April 1937
- GENRE
- Country