Merle Haggard watched Johnny Cash play San Quentin from the inmates' seats
In 1960 Johnny Cash played a concert at San Quentin, and one inmate in the audience, prisoner A45200, came away knowing what he would do once he got out. His name was Merle Haggard. Within a decade the former burglar had his first number-one country hit, a song about being a lonesome fugitive.
Haggard was born in 1937 in Oildale, California, in a railway boxcar his father had converted into a house after the family left Oklahoma when their farm burned. His father died when Merle was nine, a loss that marked him for life. At 12 he got his brother's guitar and taught himself from records by Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams. He was also shoplifting and writing bad cheques, and spent his teens escaping from one juvenile institution after another.
Music kept tugging at him. His first paid gig, in a Modesto bar, earned five dollars and free beer. Later, sitting backstage at a Frizzell show, he sang along so audibly that Frizzell called him out to perform, and the crowd liked him. But in 1957 he was caught trying to rob a roadhouse and ended up in San Quentin. There he ran a gambling and home-brew racket and spent a week in solitary, near the death-row author Caryl Chessman. Chessman's case, and the fate of a fellow inmate who escaped and was later executed, persuaded him to change course.
He finished a high school equivalency, held a steady prison job, played in the jail's country band and walked out in 1960. His first single sold so poorly that only 200 copies were pressed, but Bakersfield was developing a rawer alternative to polished Nashville records, and Haggard became central to it. Songs by Liz Anderson brought his first top 10 and then, in 1967, the number one I'm a Lonesome Fugitive; she had no idea about his prison record when she wrote it.
He went on to 38 country number ones, including Mama Tried, and also played fiddle. In 1972 Governor Ronald Reagan granted him a full pardon. Rolling Stone later ranked him the greatest country artist of all time, ahead of Johnny Cash himself. He died in 2016, on his own birthday.
Source: Merle Haggard
