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You are here: Home / Music / Merle Haggard RIP

Merle Haggard RIP

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Dead at 79. One of the first fun things I did when I moved to Athens, Georgia after grad school was go to a Merle Haggard birthday tribute show. My friend who took me there told me Muskogee was Muscogee County, Georgia and that the song was making fun of the place.

Always loved Tonight he Bottle Let Me Down.

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34Comments

  2. 2.

    dexwood

    Merle, like each and all of us, had his flaws. He made the world a bit better nevertheless.

  5. 5.

    Miss Bianca

    @Keith P.: Damn it, man…I *knew* Joe Cocker, and that meme still cracked me up. I must be one sick freak…

    And yeah, “Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down” is definitely up there as a candidate for Best. Merle Song.Ever

  6. 6.

    cmorenc

    Dang – my wife and I have tickets to what was to have been a double-header concert by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard in Cary, NC on May 22nd. Haggard is the one great hard-core traditional country artist I had never seen live in concert, and now I’ll have to wait to (hopefully) hear him sing in the Heavenly choir someday. RIP Merle. Here’s one of his best songs, “Today I started loving you again”, performed by Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow, with Merle sitting in the audience quietly singing along, quite visibly moved by their mesmerizingly beautiful rendition of his song.

  10. 10.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Keith P.: LOL.

    And on his birthday, no less. he was one of the old time greats.I’m guessing Omnes and I might share a favorite cover Merle Haggard did.

  13. 13.

    SiubhanDuinne

    My friend who took me there told me Muskogee was Muscogee County, Georgia and that the song was making fun of the place.

    Earlier today, I heard a plummy-voiced BBC newsreader refer to the song “Okie From Muskojee.”

  17. 17.

    David VanHooser

    Hey, I lived in Athens 1978-90. As for Merle, I liked the good things he said about Obama after meeting him at the Kennedy Center Honors & how he complained about the non-stop attacks on “our President”.

  18. 18.

    cgordon

    At the honkytonk I spend way too much time in, it’s almost a requirement to play a Merle Haggard song every set.

  20. 20.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Omnes Omnibus: Not surpising, but you need to hear this if you haven’t.

    And Steve Earle’s interview about “getting heckled by my hero” is well worth a watch.

  22. 22.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’ve always loved that, and I recently read that Daniel married a medical student from France and moved there with her; there’s a picture of him, TVZ and Guy and Susanna Clark on their front porch, which is what provoked the inquiry and explanation. Damned if I know where I saw that.
    If you’ve never watched the earlier & bigger than the ACL memorial where Guy Clark opens with “I booked this gig 35 years ago,” that’s worth a search.

  24. 24.

    mvr

    Glad Doug! recognized this. A complicated man who wrote good songs and sang them with conviction. Not always on the right side of everything, but he sure kept my AM radio on the country part of the dial in the ealry 80s (along with George Jones, Rosanne Cash, and a few others, even while some folks were making me wonder whether that was the part of dial to be on.)

  25. 25.

    dww44

    My friend who took me there told me Muskogee was Muscogee County, Georgia and that the song was making fun of the place.

    Native Georgian here. The Muscogee were a Southeastern Indian tribe, part of the Creek Nation, who were forced to cede their lands to Georgia and to the U.S.in the 1820’s and in the 1830’s were forced to relocate to Indian Territory in Oklahoma where they reside today. The Muscogee, aka Muskogee, went with them.

  26. 26.

    mental.masala

    I have a few favorite Merle Haggard songs – he was a wizard with language, using clever turns of a phrase to convey sorrow or darkness. One of my favorites is a cover of “Sing Me Back Home” by Richard Shindell on his Reunion Hill album, an unlisted extra song tacked on to the end of the last track. Beautiful backing vocals from Teresa Williams or Lucy Kaplansky, a steel guitar solo, some tinkling piano.

    Given Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and other jingoistic songs, I find it a little funny that one of the Grateful Dead’s standards was “Mama Tried.”

  27. 27.

    JaneE

    It was about an Okie from Muskogee Oklahoma. Back in the dust bowl days Okie was someone from Oklahoma, a derogatory for whites equivalent to the N-word. Just as blacks would sometimes use the N-word as a familiar greeting or honorific, native Oklahomans embraced Okie.

    My parents were Okies from Muskogee, back at the beginning of the depression, before they moved west in the early 30’s. I can remember my grandmother visiting in the early 60’s and calling a woman she thought might be a friend she had lost touch with. Grandma’s first words were “do you know who this is?” And then she burst out laughing. The woman had replied “I don’t know the voice, but I know it’s an Okie”. The town Muskogee was named after the Indian tribe. Muskogee, OK also has a regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs with lots of old documents concerning the Indian rolls.

  29. 29.

    MikeBoyScout

    Can’t say I’ve ever been a “country music” fan, but Merle Haggard has been a staple of my musical diet all my life. Damn

  31. 31.

    SectionH

    Most of what I know about country music I owe to my first husband, and that’s a srsly redeeming feature about the guy. I’d have missed a whole lotta great stuff otherwise.

    Peace, Merle.

  34. 34.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    My grandmother was a Merle Haggard fan, so I heard his music as a kiddo, along with lots of the others when country music was “country and western” as oposed to the pop “country music” is today. The C&W music is now “Americana.”

    @The Golux: I’d forgotten that one (she says with shame) and you can hear the Texas in Delbert’s voice, which is among the reasons it’s so powerful.

    I’m a big Steve Earle fan, yet I still believe every Townes lover should hear the Jason Isbell version .

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