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“There’s Stuff That Has Never Been Heard” – Merle Haggard’s Son, Ben, Says There Are Tons Of Archival Songs He’d Like To Release
New Merle Haggard coming soon? Music to my ears…
Over the last several years, we’ve seen the families of legends like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings have posthumously released archived songs that had never been heard before, decades after they were written and recorded.
Earlier this year, Waylon’s son Shooter announced that he had discovered a treasure trove of unreleased Waylon music, which he managed to turn into three separate albums that are slated for release.
The first one, Songbird, will be out on October 3rd, and features songs he recorded decades ago, during the height of his career, but for whatever reason never made it to an album or got completely finished. Shooter sad they didn’t need too much work, but he did add some background vocals and other instrumentation just to polish it up and make it ready to be put on a professional album in the modern world of 2025.
And it sounds like Merle Haggard might be next.
Recently, his sons Ben and Noel appeared on the Drifting Cowboy Podcast and they revealed that there’s already certain things in the works. Ben says he’s been “messing around” with some archival songs in the studio, explaining that they have a good amount of music and even live performances footage and audio in the archive that he thinks his mom will want to get out to fans:
“Oh yeah. Yeah. There’s some stuff we’ve been messing around with in the studio. There’s stuff of his, you know, a good amount of archive. Live shows and stuff… my mother will probably end up doing something with. Getting some stuff out there.”
Ben said a lot of it is brand new songs that have never been heard, and he thinks they need to “find a way out”:
“There’s stuff that has never been heard, new songs and stuff out there, for certain. Which need to find a way out, if you ask me.”
Obviously, if anything is actually going to come out, it sounds like they’re in the early stages, but considering how interested Ben is in getting some of that music out, I would not be surprised at all to see a project or something in the future, especially considering how well-received the Waylon stuff has been so far.
Noel added that they even have some more obscure stuff in the archive, like little home movies Merle made with his band and friends with cameras he bought from a Bakersfield TV station that was going out of business decades ago:
“There’s some homemade movies that he used to do in Bakersfield. There was a TV station that was going out of business, so he bought the cameras and the band, everybody… he had names for everybody… they were stating up probably longer than most people.
I was just a little kid running wires and stuff for them, you know. But it was hilarious. He’d do commercials and everything. Those have got to be somewhere, you know.”
Now that’s something we NEED to see…
It’s been really cool to see how Shooter has poured so much into this new project honoring his father, and obviously most of us never thought we’d get to hear brand new Waylon Jennings music again, so it would be incredible if we got something similar from Merle’s archive, as well.
He was such a prolific songwriter who had a lasting, very important impact on country music, and it sounds like we might get to hear more of it sometime soon.
The full podcast is available below.
The post “There’s Stuff That Has Never Been Heard” – Merle Haggard’s Son, Ben, Says There Are Tons Of Archival Songs He’d Like To Release first appeared on Whiskey Riff.
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