Merle Haggard, country music icon, dies at 79

Merle Haggard, the country music troubadour who carried the flame for the Bakersfield Sound, a bare-knuckled strain of the genre born out of dusty regional honky tonks, for more than half a century, died on Wednesday, April 16 - his 79th birthday - at his home near Redding, Ca. Mr. Haggard became a household name after his song “Okie From Muskogee” hit No. 1 in 1969, a cranky Vietnam era anthem that disparaged hippies, free love and the coming Zeitgeist: “We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/ We don't take our trips on LSD/ We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street/ 'Cause we like living right and being free.” “Haggard's songs ring like literature with the voice of a great writer,” wrote former Chronicle critic Joel Selvin. The son of Oklahoma Dust Bowl refugees, he grew up in the settlements on the outskirts of Bakersfield in a boxcar his father James Haggard, a carpenter with the Santa Fe railroad, converted into a home for the family during the Depression. Following his release from prison, Mr. Haggard put out his first record in 1963 for the Tally label, helping push forward the gritty Bakersfield Sound as a reaction to the over-produced country and western music coming out of Nashville. After his prime run of hits of songs about heartbreak, outlaws and drifters, Mr. Haggard became an elder statesmen of the country music world, and a vocal critic of the contemporary strains of the genre. Following a dispute with his label over the 1989 recording Me and Crippled Soldiers Give a Damn, a rejoinder to the Supreme Court's decision to allow flag burning under the First Amendment, Mr. Haggard’s career hit a speed bump. In 2000, he made a comeback album of sorts for punk-rock label Anti- Records, "If I Could Only Fly;" and took on the music of his boyhood on "Roots" the next year. In 2004, he briefly renewed his lifelong association with Capitol Records to cut "Unforgettable," a fine set of pop standards, done honky-tonk style, that he'd learned working bars at the beginning of his career. Mr. Haggard battled lung cancer in 2008 and underwent follow-up surgery in 2015 to correct complications from the initial surgery to remove a lemon-size tumor from his lung. The same year, Haggard’s duets album with Willie Nelson, “Django and Jimmie,” debuted at the top of the Billboard Country Albums chart, and in the number seven spot on the all-genre Billboard 200. Having declared bankruptcy in the early ‘90s while $5 million in debt, Mr. Haggard stayed on to road, playing small clubs and county fairs.