Merle Haggard
Appearances
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
And instead of growing up in the middle of a battlefield with bullets flying around me, I grew up on the isolation ward of Death Row. And that's where the song Mama Tried gets close to being autobiographical.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Yeah, I was... I got... Caught for making beer. Making some beer up there, and I got too much of my own beer and got drunk in the yard and got arrested. It's hard to get arrested in San Quentin, but I did. And they sent me to what was known as the Shelf. And the Shelf is part of the North Block, which you share with the inmates on death row.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
And it's kind of like the – there's not too many more stops for you, actually. And that was the, as you put it, sobering experience for me. I wound up with nothing to – nothing to lay on except a Bible, in an old concrete slab, and woke up from that drunk that I'd been on that day, and I could hear some prisoners talking in the area next to me.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
In other words, there was an alleyway between the back of the cells, and I could hear people talking over there, and I recognized the guy as being Carol Shessman, a guy that they were fixing to execute. And... I don't know.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
It was just something about the whole situation that I knew that if I ever got out of there, if I was lucky enough to get out, I made up my mind while I still had that hangover that I was all finished.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Well, I... I went back down on the yard and went down and asked for the roughest job in the penitentiary, which was a textile mill. And went down and just started building my reputation, you know. Just started running in reverse from what I'd been doing and started trying to build up a long line of good things to be proud of. And that's what I've been doing since then.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Yeah. Yeah, I was already into doing that. I really didn't, I don't think, believe that I sincerely had a future in it. I think I was just kind of like... doing what I thought was probably a waste of time or a hobby at the very most and maybe some extra money on the weekend sort of thing. But that's, you know, that's when I was in San Quentin.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I still didn't really thoroughly realize that I had to do this the rest of my life and that it was going to be this successful for me and I was going to, you know, have all the things happen that have happened. I had no idea that you could never have convinced me of a minute amount of the success I've had. I would never have believed it.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Yeah, that was the basic reason, I think, that these... Friends of mine talked me out of going on that escape. They felt that I had talent, and they felt that I was just an ornery kid and could probably make something out of my life. Believe it or not, in the penitentiary, there's some pretty nice people and very unfortunate people.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
And they love to let somebody, so to speak, get up on their shoulders. They like to boost somebody over the wall if they can. If they can't make it themselves, they, I think, sincerely love to see someone else make it.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I have an older brother named Lowell, and Lowell had a service station at the time, and there was a guy that came in and wanted a couple dollars worth of gas and didn't have no money, and he left a little Bronson, sort of a Stella Sears and Roebuck type guitar. And it was collateral, and he never did come back after it, and that old guitar sat in the
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
closet there for a couple of years and finally I think my mother showed me a couple of chords. My brother didn't know how to play and my dad had passed away. He was a musician in the family so mama showed me C chord that daddy showed her and she didn't know how to make C chord very good. But I took it from that and I beat around on that old Bronson, I think it was a Bronson guitar.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Well, about the same time that I discovered Jimmy Rogers, I was about 12 years old, I discovered Hank Williams. And I remember seeing on the yellow MGM records, there was the artist's name, and then there was another... name underneath that artist. It was small, very small letters, and it said composer, and I didn't know what a composer was. I asked my mother, I said, what does this mean?
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
She said, I don't know, and she called the record store, and they told her, that's the writer, that's the guy that writes the songs. And it seemed to me that it was very important to have your name in both places there. I noticed that Hank Williams had a little extra clout because he wrote his own songs.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Jimmy Rogers, the same thing, you know, and so I felt it was just as necessary to become a songwriter as it was to try to learn to play the guitar or, you know, it was certainly a tool that most people, I think, in the business would like to be a singer-songwriter if they could be because it It is in some way your retirement.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
You can have a great career, and if you don't write songs or have a publishing company or something to lean back on when it's all over, it's a pretty hard drop back to reality. Once you've learned to live under the conditions I've learned to live on, you better have yourself a publishing company or I'll have to go back to being an outlaw.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Well, I really didn't realize what method to take at first. I must have wrote maybe 1,500 songs that weren't any good, or at least I never kept them, and finally... With a lot of help and a lot of people who had written hit songs, who I'd become friends with, such as Fuzzy Owen, who became my personal manager. He was a songwriter, and he taught me how to write songs.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Finally, I wrote one that was worth keeping. I think I've written about 300 keepers or so, maybe 400.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Yeah, it was sort of a rock and roll song, an Elvis-type rock and roll thing called If You Want to Be My Woman. And Glen Campbell opened his shows with it for years, and I still do the song. I wrote it when I was about 14. But I didn't keep very many. That was probably one out of the 1,500 that got kept.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
And you keep pushing me back. Something about... I didn't own the money that I earned, but you refused to give me something equal in return.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
No, I... Very best, I... I counted on extra money, as I was saying, you know, like, you know, maybe a hobby. You know, I figured I was going to have to have some of the means of employment, you know, support.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Well, I... When I came out of the penitentiary, I went to work for my brother digging ditches and wiring houses. He had an electrical company, Hag Electric. And he was paying me $80 a week. This was 1960. And I was working eight hours a day there. And I got me a little gig playing guitar four nights a week for $10 a night. And...
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
There was a little radio show that we had to broadcast from this little nightclub called High Pockets. And it just all started from that. Some people that had... That was local stars around heard me on this radio program and came down and offered me a better job in town. And...
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
It wasn't just a matter of weeks until I was part of the main clique in Bakersfield, and it was hard to get in that clique. There was a lot of people like Buck Owens, and there was people that were really good and proved how good they were later on with their success. Bakersfield was some sort of a... I don't know, it was like...
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
country music artists found their way to Bakersfield and had their success out of there. I don't understand why, actually. It may be because of the migration that took place in the 30s or whatever. There was a lot of people that came out there from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas that had a lot of soul. And this thing we call...
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
country music kind of came out of those hockey talks, you know, and some of the same area that a lot of other things came out of.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Well, you know, a lot of people may or may not understand how hard it is for a person coming out of an institution, you know, whether it be a prison or whether it be a some sort of a mental institution, whether it be the Army or whatever.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
There's a thing that happens, like when you leave the penitentiary and you've been there for three years, you have friends and you have a way of life and you have a routine and a whole way of life that you just give up all of a sudden. One day you're there and the next day you're not there and you don't have any more friends
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
You don't have any more friends from the outside because things went on when you left and you can't find anybody there. And the people you left behind in prison are really your only friends. And there's a period of adjustment that took me about 120 days, I don't know, about four months. A couple of times I really wanted to go back. And it's really a weird sensation.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
It's the loneliest feeling in the world about the second night out of the penitentiary.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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...
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
We'd watch the brakemen and the trainmen do it. You know, it wasn't really all that hard.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Somehow or another, somebody watched out for me. I didn't get anything like that.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Escaping from jail and escaping from places that they had me locked up in was part of the thing that I wanted to do.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
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
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Went with, wound up being executed in the gas chamber. He went out and held court in the street, killed a highway patrolman. And so it was really good that I didn't go.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Yeah, I've had a lot of those things in my life. And, you know, those are the sort of things that... that a guy unknowingly like myself, I guess I was gathering up meat for songs, you know. I don't know what I was doing. I really kind of was crazy as a kid, and then all of a sudden, you know, while I was in San Quentin, I just...
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I one day understood that I saw the light and I just didn't want to do that no more. And I realized what a mess I'd made out of my life. And I got out of there and stayed out of there. Never to go back and went and apologized to all the people I'd wronged and tried to pay back the people that I'd taken money from, borrowed money from or whatever.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I think when I was 31 years old, I paid everybody back that I'd ever taken anything from and including my mother.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
It was just obvious. I don't think there was ever any time that anybody in my family was worried about me staying with this. It was just the way that some people grow up in the Army, and it's hard to be 18 years old. They send 18-year-old boys to war because they don't know what to do with them. And I was one that... I wound up going to prison rather than war.