2016 Wednesday -- Country Outlaw

Merle Haggard, the country music outlaw who released 71 top ten hits, died today on his 79th birthday. His parents, Jim & Flossie, were part of the "Dust Bowl" exodus that left Oklahoma for Bakersfield, California, where Haggard was born 79 years ago in 1937. He was only nine years old when his dad died and then he spent his teenage years in and out of reform school and prison. For two years and nine months he was incarcerated in San Quentin. He said, "The more I went to jail, the more I learned how to become an outlaw." In 1960 he was released and had enough material in his songbook to produce over 30 number one hits.

In 1969 his song, "Okie from Muskogee," made him famous. I wasn't drawn to the song, but I like what Haggard had to say about it in a interview in 2010, "Everybody's proud of where they came from, and I'm proud to be an Okie, and somebody else is proud to be something else, but everybody's proud of something."

When my parents moved in August of 1966 to "Two Beans Nowhere" to rent and run a little beer bar, it was music like Haggard's "Okie" song -- his answer to anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and every other facet of the counterculture -- that was most often playing on the jukebox. It wasn't my kind of music, mostly because I was part of the counterculture and becoming more and more anti the Vietnam War.

Watching the news today about Haggard made him so much more personal. He is a legend.

Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol