Before he became a musician, Merle Haggard lived the kind of life that's often mythologized in song: Hopping freights and doing prison time. When he became a star, he acquired his own observation car. Now that coach is part of the Virginia Scenic Railway. Terry Gross spoke with Haggard in 1995. Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two albums: one's a collection of recordings by Paul Robeson, and the other features the music of Paul Robeson, performed by singer Davóne Tines. Finally, Justin Chang reviews David Cronenberg's new thriller, The Shrouds.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Merle Haggard and why is he significant in country music?
Outlaw country, ballads, the Bakersfield sound, western swing, jazz, and more, unquote. Haggard was inducted into the Country Hall of Fame in 1994 and was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. He died in 2016 on his 79th birthday. When Haggard was young, he hardly seemed destined for success. He spent time in and out of reform school and prison before he found his way back to music.
Haggard's best-known songs include Mama Tried, Okie from Muskogee, Today I Started Loving You Again, and The Bottle Let Me Down. Merle Haggard had a lifelong fascination with trains. After he became a star, he acquired his own railway observation car. And that railway car, on which you can book passage, is now part of the Virginia Scenic Railway.
When Terry spoke with Merle Haggard in 1995, he had reissued an album he recorded in 1969 featuring the songs of Jimmy Rogers. They began with Haggard's recording of the Jimmy Rogers classic, Waiting for a Train.
All around the water tanks Waiting for a train A thousand miles away from home Sleeping in the rain I walked up to a brakeman To give him my talk He says, if you've got money I'll see that you don't walk. I haven't got a nickel, not a penny can I show. Get off, get off your railroad bum and slam that boxcar door.
Did you hop freights when you were young?
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Chapter 2: What was Merle Haggard's experience with hopping freight trains?
Yeah, sure did.
Where would you go?
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.
Was it hard to learn how to hop a freight?
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.
What's the worst or the most surprising experience that you had on a freight train?
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Chapter 3: How did Merle Haggard's troubled youth and time in reform school shape his life?
This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's 1995 interview with country star Merle Haggard. We'll dive back in with a taste of one of his biggest hits, Mama Tried.
The first thing I remember knowing Was a lonesome whistle blowing And a young'un's dream of growing up to ride On a freight train leaving town Not knowing where I'm bound And no one could change my mind But Mama Tried One and only rebel child from a family meek and mild, my mama seemed to know what lay in store.
Despite all my Sunday learning, towards the bad I kept on turning, till mama couldn't hold me anymore. I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole. No one could steer me right, but Mama tried. Mama tried. Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied. That leaves only me to blame, cause Mama tried.
Merle Haggard is a song autobiographical.
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.
Your father died when you were nine, is that right? Nine. So your mother had to raise you alone after that.
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.
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Chapter 4: What were Merle Haggard's experiences with prison and escaping from institutions?
I think you were 14 when your mother put you in a juvenile home.
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.
How would you escape from reform school and youth institutions?
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.
Was there an outlaw mystique that you wanted to have?
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.
So what was your most ingenious escape?
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Chapter 5: How did Merle Haggard turn his life around after prison?
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.
Was that a real sobering experience for you?
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.
What did you say to your mother when you changed your life around?
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.
You were on Death Row?
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Chapter 6: What role did music play in Merle Haggard's life while he was incarcerated?
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.
How were you lucky enough to get out?
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.
Back in the days when you were in prison, was music a big part of your life then? Were you singing, playing, writing songs?
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.
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Chapter 7: How did Merle Haggard start playing guitar and begin songwriting?
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.
Tell us a story how you got your first guitar.
My first guitar?
Yeah. Or how you started to play guitar, as ever as it was. Well...
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.
I imagine when you first got the guitar, you were playing songs that you heard on the radio. How did you start writing songs yourself?
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?
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