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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
Finally, I wrote one that was worth keeping. I think I've written about 300 keepers or so, maybe 400.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
It's the loneliest feeling in the world about the second night out of the penitentiary.
Showing 41–56 of 56 · page 3 of 3
← Previous