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
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.
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...
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.
I think when I was 31 years old, I paid everybody back that I'd ever taken anything from and including my mother.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My first guitar?
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
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.
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?
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.
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