NEW YORK — Merle Haggard, one of the most successful singers in the history of country music, a contrarian populist whose songs about his scuffling early life and his time in prison made him the closest thing that the genre had to a real-life outlaw hero, died at his home in California on Wednesday, his 79th birthday.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, said his manager, Frank Mull.
Few country artists have been as popular and admired as Mr. Haggard. Thirty-eight of his singles, including “Workin’ Man Blues’’ and the 1973 recession-era lament “If We Make It Through December,’’ reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart from 1966 to 1987. He released 71 Top 10 country hits in all, 34 in a row from 1967 to 1977. Seven singles crossed over to the pop charts.
John Rumble, senior historian for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, called him ‘‘country music’s greatest songwriter, with the arguable exception of Hank Williams. When you think about the vast array of subject matter, it’s astonishing: the realism, the very careful and artful way that he puts songs together, the turns of phrase — it is deceptively simple.’’
Along with singers Buck Owens and Wynn Stewart, Mr. Haggard typified country music’s ‘‘Bakersfield sound’’ of the 1960s. The California city, home to many who fled the dust bowls of the 1930s and worked in its oil fields, was a thriving center of country music. Whereas Nashville producers pressured their singers to adopt to a ‘‘countrypolitan’’ style with choirs and string sections, Bakersfield built its reputation on a grittier sound and twangy guitars.
Mr. Haggard cited Lefty Frizzell, Elvis Presley, Jimmie Rodgers, Chuck Berry, and Bob Wills as among the artists who influenced his sound.
“I thought, if I combine all that, maybe I can come up with something sustaining,’’ he told LA Weekly in 1999.
Mr. Haggard had an immense influence on other performers — not just other country singers but also ’60s rock bands such as the Byrds and the Grateful Dead, as well as Elvis Costello and the Mekons, all of whom recorded his songs. Some 400 artists have released versions of his 1968 hit “Today I Started Loving You Again.’’
He was always the outsider. His band was aptly named the Strangers. Unlike his friend Johnny Cash, Mr. Haggard didn’t merely visit San Quentin State Prison to perform for the inmates. Convicted of burglary in 1957, he served three years there and spent his 21st birthday in solitary confinement.
He went on to write “Mama Tried,’’ “Branded Man,’’ and several other candid songs about his incarceration, all of them sung in a supple baritone suffused with dignity and regret. Many of his other recordings championed the struggles of the working class from which he rose. He became known as a poet of the common man.
Much of Mr. Haggard’s appeal was attributable to his versatile band, in which he sometimes played fiddle and lead guitar. But a great deal of it was also because of the pliancy of his singing voice, a deeply expressive instrument that lent itself to a variety of tempos, arrangements, and emotions. He was as convincing singing about drinking and heartbreak as he was performing devotional numbers, topical material, and novelties.
Mr. Haggard was probably best known for his controversial hit “Okie From Muskogee,’’ a flippant broadside, released in 1969, that defended conservative heartland values against the hippie counterculture:
“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee; We don’t take our trips on LSD; We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street; We like living right and being free.’’
Mr. Haggard later expressed ambivalence about the song’s message. To prove that he was more open-minded than “Okie’’ suggested, he had hoped to release “Irma Jackson,’’ a paean to interracial love, as a follow-up. Instead his record company issued “The Fightin’ Side of Me,’’ a jingoistic anthem that also proved to be divisive.
“I was dumb as a rock when I wrote ‘Okie From Muskogee,’?’’ Mr. Haggard told the Americana music magazine No Depression in 2003. “I sing with a different intention now.’’
He wrote empathetically about poverty; the Great Depression was often his muse. His late-1960s hit “Hungry Eyes’’ revisited the dignity-starved lives his parents had led on arriving at California’s squalid Hoovervilles after fleeing the Dust Bowl in 1935:
“A canvas-covered cabin in a crowded labor camp; Stands out in this memory I revive; ‘Cause my Daddy raised a family there; With two hard-working hands; And tried to feed my mother’s hungry eyes.’’
Merle Ronald Haggard was born on April 6, 1937, in Oildale, Calif. His first years were spent in the abandoned boxcar that his father, James, a railroad carpenter, had converted into a home for his family. James Haggard died of a stroke in 1946, after which Mr. Haggard’s mother, the former Flossie Mae Harp, a strict and pious member of the ultraconservative Church of Christ, took a bookkeeping job to provide for her three children.
Chafing against his mother’s yoke, young Merle got into trouble for breaking and entering, shoplifting, and passing bad checks. Rebellion and escape, themes steeped more in rock ‘n’ roll than in country music, would figure prominently in Mr. Haggard’s songwriting.
In 1957, he was charged with burglary and, by his account, considered fleeing from custody with an inmate nicknamed Rabbit. The other man proceeded with the escape without Mr. Haggard and managed to elude capture until he was caught after fatally shooting a state trooper. Convicted of murder, the man was sent to the gas chamber at San Quentin, and Mr. Haggard wrote a song for him, the death-row ballad “Sing Me Back Home.’’
Mr. Haggard was paroled from San Quentin in 1960. He was granted a full pardon in 1972 by Governor Ronald Reagan of California.
Mr. Haggard recalled: ‘‘San Quentin was beneficial to me as the army is for some people. I was 20 and full of piss and vinegar with no intention of doing anything right.’’
After his release, Mr. Haggard performed in bars in Bakersfield and later in larger rooms such as the Blackboard, where he met Bonnie Owens, a cocktail waitress who had been married to country singer Buck Owens.
A duet Owens and Mr. Haggard recorded, “Just Between the Two of Us,’’ reached the country Top 40 in 1964. They married in 1965.
The year before, Mr. Haggard had received his first big break when he was hired to play bass in the band of Stewart, who also wrote Mr. Haggard’s first hit, “Sing a Sad Song,’’ in 1963.
Mr. Haggard reached the country chart more than 100 times before stations, in the late 1980s, stopped playing his records in favor of those of a younger generation of artists. “That’s the Way Love Goes,’’ a duet with Willie Nelson, received a Grammy Award in 1985.
Though marked by greater stability than he had known earlier in his life, Mr. Haggard’s later years were not carefree. He was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1993 and to sell the copyrights to some of his songs to pay off his debts.
‘‘Life has been peaks and valleys all the way for me,’’ he once told the Toronto Sun. ‘‘The only way I know to come out of the valleys is to write my way out.’’
Material from the Washington Post was used in this obituary.
