Merle Haggard: Songs explored the grim legacy of the Great Depression

Merle Haggard, the American singer-songwriter who depicted hopelessness and desolation with startling clarity and helped fuel country music's worldwide popularity died near Redding, California on his 79th birthday.

Like his peers in country music, Haggard’s music dwelled on drinking, rural life and the thin line between love and heartbreak. But his grim exploration of the restlessness and uncertainty that haunted many children of the Great Depression may prove to be his most enduring musical legacy.

His hit songs such as Mama Tried and If We Make It Through December reveal troubled characters, plagued by criminal pasts and joblessness, contemplating the dark unknown ahead, certain only in the knowledge that flight is their only redemption.

While Johnny Cash and other country singers regularly invoked home as an ideal, Haggard contemplated mothers and fathers and children stripped of their dignity and on the edge of starvation, as in 1969's smash hit Hungry Eyes. Indeed, they were heirs to the tired and broken figures who populate John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, timeless Great Depression literature.

Born in Bakersfield, California, an oil and agriculture city, Haggard saw dissolution all around him: his parents, James Francis and Flossie Mae Haggard, had fled the Dust Bowl-scorched state of Oklahoma in 1934 and settled the family in an abandoned railroad car. In 1946, James died unexpectedly, fracturing young Haggard’s sense of purpose. From his teens through his early 20s, he was often in jail for petty crimes, but memories of his father’s guitar playing and the music of country music greats Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams tugged at him. He honed his singing, songwriting and strumming in clubs across the San Joaquin Valley where Cash’s hits were always in demand. “His songs were always my favourites because they were easy to do, and they’d create such a disturbance,” he told a documentary film producer in 2007.

Like a scene in a hastily concocted movie, the young man at the crossroads of music and crime in 1958 saw Cash perform at the notorious San Quentin State Prison where Haggard was serving three years for burglary. “He was making it out there among all those people we didn’t understand,” said Haggard. “And it gave me inspiration to try.”

Within a decade, he rivalled his hero, recording major hits such as Sing Me Back Home, Workin' Man Blues, and Silver Wings, all of which became standards and helped carry American-made country music to audiences around the world.

He appeared regularly on television, toured internationally, and drew legions of faithful fans who were no doubt magnetized by his dangerous past and convincing vocal delivery. “The singing voice of Merle Haggard is so good,” wrote author John Grissim, “it can resurrect the most lifeless clichés.”

But this musician who christened his band "The Strangers" was often edgy in the new arena that fame had carved out. While the masses flocked to him, he warded off admirers on the political left who would make him a populist hero. In the Age of Aquarius, his Okie from Muskogee and The Fightin' Side of Me celebrated President Nixon's silent majority and ridiculed the American counter-culture and other critics of the United States. Many called him a xenophobe, but Haggard mocked such talk even if it meant alienating audiences in liberal population centres. When asked in 1993 if he identified as a Republican or Democrat, he scoffed at both parties.

Haggard eschewed the country music capital of Nashville for a ranch in his native California and while banality crept into his industry in the 1980s, he continued to portray alienation in the American experience. In that era when Willie Nelson covered pop star Michael Jackson and Cash recorded a self-effacing novelty called The Chicken in Black, Haggard offered up Big City, in which a factory worker longs to scale the post-modern fences around him. It tapped into the Reagan era's ennobling of the individual, not to mention its suspicion of social welfare, and, as ever, the only answer to his character's malaise was in the rattle of a passing freight train.

“Anybody coulda had a hit on it,” he told writer Daniel Cooper in 1999. “It just said what people wanted to hear.”

In recent decades, deserving laurels enveloped the great, old chieftain, and last year's duet album with Willie Nelson, Django and Jimmie, upended the cash registers with irresistible tributes to old legends and plenty of predictable outlaw swagger. But Haggard made room, too, for the estranged man somewhere inside of him. The album's Swinging Doors, which he first recorded in 1966, finds a lovelorn man haunting a seedy barroom so unlike his warm and familiar home life; tragically, he has become unmoored from his place in the world.

Haggard is survived by his wife, Theresa Ann Lane, and their two children, Jennessa and Ben; four children from his first marriage, Noel, Marty, Dana, and Kelli; and his sister Lillian.