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Merle Haggard Saw Some Awful Things In Prison
While many country artists carry the “outlaw” tag, few (if any) more rightly earned that title than The Hag.
A somewhat troubled childhood led to years spent behind bars for Merle Haggard.
Merle was born the third child of Flossie Mai and James Haggard in 1937. At the time, the family was living in a converted railroad boxcar, which his father purchased from the Santa Fe Railroad in Oildale, California, where he was working at the time. Their life, while not the easiest, was alright until James died of a brain hemorrhage when Merle was nine. As you’d expect, the loss of his father at such a pivotal age weighed heavily on him for the rest of his life and was only made worse by his mother having to re-enter the workforce to make a living for the family. While the time spent unsupervised lead to his initial love of music, diving into the collection of records at home with names like Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Williams, and learning to play guitar, it also lead to a pattern of behaviors that continually devolved until the law got involved.
At 13, he was stealing, shoplifting, and writing bad checks, which lead to a stint in a juvenile detention center. The next year he and a friend ran away from home and made their way down to Texas by hopping trains and hitchhiking. When they got back later in the year, they were accused of robbery and sent to jail until the real criminals were found, though he didn’t stay free for long and found himself behind bars again not long after. This time he made his first of many prison escapes and hightailed it down to Modesto, California, where he built a weird little life for himself as a cook, hay pitcher, oil well shooter, and truck driver. It was also in Modesto that he first played music in public, at a bar called “Fun Center”, where they paid him $5 and gave him free beer (guess underage drinking wasn’t a big deal back then).
But he didn’t stay there forever and again returned to Bakersfield, where he was arrested for truancy (safe to say he didn’t enroll in school down in Modesto) and petty larceny. Once again, he escaped that juvenile detention center but was recaptured and sent to a high-security facility called the Preston School of Industry, where he spent 15 months.
After serving that sentence, he got out and tried to stay on the straight and narrow for a short time, which is when he had his first real taste of what being a country artist might look like. He attended a Lefty Frizzell concert with his friend and the two sat backstage. Left heard Merle singing along and brought him up to perform with him. You can read that entire story here. This was the first night where Merle swore he’d become a country music singer but there was still trouble ahead.
Locked Up In San Quentin
While he did start playing shows at night, he continued working in the oil fields or as a farmhand during the day, which as you could imagine didn’t pay too well. Merle had gotten married at this time and the couple was struggling financially, so he turned to the devil that he knew and attempted to rob a roadhouse in Bakersfield. Once again, the police caught him and Merle found himself behind bars, this time as an adult. He attempted another escape but was caught and moved to San Quentin prison to serve the rest of his time.
Yes, the same San Quentin that Johnny Cash played at. You probably know the story, but read all the details here.
While inside, he didn’t clean up his act immediately. He was busted for gambling and brewing “orange beer” in his cell, and when the guards found him drunk one day, sent him to solitary confinement for a week.
This started a series of events that forever changed how Merle saw the world.
He met two men on death-row, which later inspired his song “Sing Me Back Home”, but also witnessed a series of horrors in the jail that convinced him once and for all that he needed to get himself off the path of life he was walking.
In his first autobiography, Sing Me Back Home, Merle remembers a few horrific scenes he saw first hand in prison:
“I watched one man kill another over a simple insult”
“Sometimes when I lay in my bunk I could hear men crying out in pain from being raped by other inmates”
“I saw a black man burned to death on a ladder…. The five-hundred-gallon vat of starch he was checking boiled over on him, burning his black skin completely white”
He says there were more, but these three alone would be enough to scare a man straight…
When he did finally get out of San Quentin, he never again was arrested. Merle turned his life around and became the country music star we all know and love today. Would he have been as prolific if it wasn’t for these experiences? Probably not, things like that change a man in ways we can’t begin to understand.
So while we never want anyone to go through what he went through, it may have been better for all of us that he did. Who knows how many people never went to jail because they heard his story? That’s worth a heck of a lot, even though I’m sure he would have gone back and changed it all if could.
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