Merle Haggard
speaker
56 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Merle Haggard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, sure did.
Well, I lived in an oil community called Oildale, and there was a daily train that went into the oil fields, and it was a steam train back in those days, and I actually grew up every evening, you know, kind of looking forward to seeing that old train pull out of there with about 40 or 50 oil tankers back during the war, you know, and...
So it was less than a stone's, well, maybe 150 feet from my back door to where the railroad track ran. And I actually grew up right next to it. My dad worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. I was nine when he passed away. Railroads were very influential in my life, and there was enough of it in the songs that I admired to get me on the freight myself. I thought, well, this is something I've got to do.
If they're going to write songs about it, I've got to go see why. So I did, and I rode freights wherever they took me. I rode them for a block, or I'd ride them... 200 miles, or I think the longest trip I ever took was from San Antonio to El Paso, I think was the longest one.
No, I learned that probably, I think probably the first time I ever jumped on that old oil tanker was probably, I was about five years old. My mother would have died if she had known I'd been up there We used to put pennies on the track, you know, and we'd hop that old train, ride a block or two, and jump off. So it was something we learned to do young.
We'd watch the brakemen and the trainmen do it. You know, it wasn't really all that hard.
The worst? Oh, man. There was a lot of bad experiences. I got on a freight in Oregon one time, and it was leaving out of Eugene, and it went up into the Cascades and into a snowstorm, and I was traveling in the ice compartment, and me and two other oboes was in there, and it got rather cold in that metal.
I remember they stopped up in the mountains and then climbed up out of that ice compartment, and I'm shaking so bad that I dropped my suitcase off the top of the freight, and I had to get off for a while and get her up in my clothes.
Somehow or another, somebody watched out for me. I didn't get anything like that.
I didn't run into any players on the freight. Just people traveling, you know. For different reasons, I'm sure. I don't know. Most of them probably for the same reasons. I think they were probably hobos, you know. And... I remember one time I stole a can of beans out of a refrigerator car and threw it up into this box car where all the rest of the hobos were riding.
And, boy, they got really upset. They said, oh, we're going to get 50 years in the penitentiary. You know, you must be a really green guy. You know, and there was nobody who would share that. a box of green beans except one old man, and he was about 80 years old, and he threw a spoon and a can opener across the boxcar to me and said, I'll help you eat them, son.
Well, it really is, very close at least. There's some things we fudged on slightly to make it rhyme, but the majority of it, I'd say 97% of it's pretty accurate, I guess.
Yeah, and I was... To say the least, probably the most incorrigible child you could think of. I was already on the way to prison before I realized it, actually. I was really kind of a screw-up. And I really don't know why. I think it was mostly just out of boredom and lack of a father's attention, I think.
No, she didn't put me in a juvenile home. The authorities put me in there for truancy, for not going to school. And they gave me six months in like a road camp situation. And I ran off from there and stole a car. And so then the next time I went back, it was for something serious. And then I spent the next seven years running off from places.
I think I escaped 17 times from different institutions in California. And all it was was just a matter of the authorities... Running me off, you know, they're drumming up business for themselves. I really feel sorry for the way they do some of the kids, you know, and I was one of those kids. I'm going to snitch on them if I get a chance.
Well, there was different institutions and different methods. Some of them were minimum security, some of them maximum security, and some of them were kid joints, and some of them were adult jailhouses. I just didn't stay nowhere. I think Willie Sutton was my idol. At the time, I was in the middle of becoming an outlaw, and
Escaping from jail and escaping from places that they had me locked up in was part of the thing that I wanted to do.
I guess. I don't know. I admired people like Jesse James, along with a lot of other kids, but I guess I took it too far.
Probably the one that was the most ingenious was one that I didn't actually go on. I was at San Quentin. I was all set to go with the only completely successful escape out of San Quentin, I think, in 21 years. But... The people that gave me the chance to go were the same people that talked me out of it because they felt like that I was just doing it for the sport of it.
And then it was a very serious thing to the other fellow that was going. they they had a big judges chamber sort of desk they were building in the furniture factory in san quentin and and i had a friend who was building a place for two guys to be transported out that was before they had x-rays and things of that nature they just and i could have gone and uh i didn't go and and the guy that i
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