![]() This simple ode to the alluring and enduring charm of the female gender from the Lone Star state turned out to be an important career moment in Williams’ recording career. ![]() “It never has been fun being Merle Haggard,” he said in 1986, “I’ve had lots of peaks and valleys.” His tough and tender songs attest to that.As the singer gears up to return to ESPN as the musical voice of Monday Night Football next month, here are 10 moments of Hank Williams Jr’s career that - along with his legendary stage show and being the only country artist to ever have nine albums on the chart at one time - show why he stands as a distinct musical legend - and one that certainly belongs in the Country Music Hall of Fame!īest Songs: Alabama | Alan Jackson | Blake Shelton | Brad Paisley | Brett Eldredge | Carrie Underwood | Chris Stapleton | Conway Twitty | Cole Swindell | Darius Rucker | Dierks Bentley | Dixie Chicks | Dolly Parton | Eric Church | Faith Hill | Garth Brooks | Gary Allan | George Jones | George Strait | Glen Campbell | Jason Aldean | Johnny Cash | John Denver | Keith Urban | Kenny Chesney | Kenny Rogers | Lady Antebellum | Little Big Town| Martina McBride | Merle Haggard | Miranda Lambert | Patsy Cline | Randy Travis | Rascal Flatts | Reba McEntire | Sam Hunt | Shania Twain | Sheryl Crow | Thomas Rhett | Tim McGraw | Toby Keith | Travis Tritt | Vince Gill | Waylon Jennings | Willie Nelson | Zac Brown Band His best songs were often his most personal: Today I Started Loving You Again, If We Make It Through December – or his most hard-bitten – Sing Me Back Home, The Bottle Let Me Down – the latter sort earning him the respect of several generations of rock performers, from the Grateful Dead through Keith Richards, Gram Parsons, Elvis Costello, and on to the likes of contemporary songwriters like Will Oldham. So began a defiantly contrarian journey: for many, his best-known song remains 1969’s hit, Okie from Muskogee, a strident counterblast to the 60s counterculture from the heart of conservative America. ![]() On his release, Haggard played the bars of Bakersfield, California, honing what would become the “Bakersfield sound”, a wilder, less polished take on traditional Nashville country that incorporated rock, blues and honky-tonk swing. In 1957 a botched restaurant robbery attempt saw him imprisoned, first in Bakersfield jail, and then, after an escape attempt, transferred to San Quentin. He served several stretches in reform school for shoplifting and burglary, and, more than once, he escaped and lived briefly on the run from the law. Haggard’s father died when he was just nine years old and he was raised by his mother, Flossie Mae, a church-going disciplinarian against whose strictures he rebelled as a young teenager. For a time the family lived in a converted railroad boxcar. A song like Hungry Eyes, from the late 60s, harks back to his parents’ poverty-stricken lives as Dust Bowl migrants. Haggard, who died on Wednesday on his 79th birthday at his ranch in northern California, had already lived a lot before he started singing. Merle Haggard and Hank Williams Jr photographed in Goodlettsville, Tennessee in 2006. It is a style that places a premium on authenticity – the lived experience – over self-mythology. A complex lineage is suggested here: the younger man is the son of country’s music’s greatest icon, Hank Williams, while few would dispute that Haggard is the heir to Williams Sr’s tell-it-like-it-is songwriting style. In the photograph below, taken in a bar in Goodlettsville, Tennessee in 2006, Haggard, old and wise, stands alongside Hank Williams Jr, a younger singer in the maverick country tradition that Haggard had so defined on songs like Workin’ Man Blues, Branded Man and Sing Me Back Home. While Cash carefully nurtured his outlaw status, famously styling himself “the Man in Black”, the troubled, taciturn Haggard was the real deal: an outsider by temperament rather than design, someone who had found a kind of redemption in writing and singing songs about his experience of hard times. Legend has it that when Johnny Cash performed in San Quentin prison in 1958, Merle Haggard was in the audience, serving time for burglary and fleeing police custody.
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