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. #MERLEHAGGARD #LES PAUL
This is an impromptu jam session with two legends at a NY Jazz Nightclub Jam Session.
#MERLEHAGGARD #HAG
Merle Haggard was one of country music’s most versatile artists. Stylistically, he mined honky-tonk, blues, jazz, pop, and folk, and his repertory ranged wide: aching ballads (“Silver Wings”), sly, frisky narratives (“It’s Been a Great Afternoon”), semi-autobiographical reflections (“Mama Tried”), political commentaries (“Rainbow Stew”), proletarian homages (“Workin’ Man Blues”), and drinking songs that are jukebox, cover-band, and closing-time standards (“I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”).
Haggard’s acolytes are legion and include many of country music’s brightest and lesser lights, as well as thousands of nightclub musicians. As fiddler Jimmy Belken, a longtime member of Haggard’s exemplary touring band, the Strangers, once told the New Yorker, “If someone out there workin’ music doesn’t bow deep to Merle, don’t trust him about much anything else.”
Merle Ronald Haggard was born poor, though not desperately so, in Depression-era Bakersfield, California, to Jim and Flossie Haggard, migrants from Oklahoma. Jim, a railroad carpenter, died of a stroke in 1946, forcing Flossie to find work as a bookkeeper.
Flossie was a fundamentalist Christian and a stern, somewhat overprotective mother. Not surprisingly, her youngest child grew quickly from rambunctious to rake-hell. By his twenty-first birthday, Haggard had run away from home regularly, been placed in two separate reform schools (from which he escaped a half-dozen times), worked as a laborer, played guitar and sung informally, begun a family, and performed sporadically at Southern California clubs and, for three weeks, on the Smilin’ Jack Tyree Radio Show in Springfield, Missouri. He’d also spent time in local jails for theft and bad checks.
Haggard’s woebegone criminal career culminated in 1957 when, drunk and confused, he was caught burglarizing a Bakersfield roadhouse. After an attempted escape from the county jail, he was sent to San Quentin, where, in a final burst of antisocial activity, he got drunk on prison home brew, landing himself briefly in solitary confinement.
Haggard was paroled in 1960 and, after a fitful series of odd jobs, got a regular gig playing bass for Wynn Stewart in Las Vegas. Years later, his friend, the iconic songwriter Kris Kristofferson, called Haggard “the most successfully rehabilitated prisoner in American history.”
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