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Merle Haggard's music reaches across a broad range of themes and attitudes from the beginning of his singing career until his death in 2016, and his perspective on them changes—over the years certainly, but even from song to song.1 I do not believe one can reconstruct from his music a coherent, self-consistent account of his more or less libertarian views on experience, but something holds these songs together and molds them into what critics, fans, and fellow musicians universally regard as the ferocious integrity that is distinctive to his body of work.
When his frequent backup singer, second wife, and lifelong friend, Bonnie Owens, was asked in a television interview in 1996 what she would say if she had to describe Haggard as succinctly as possible, she struggled a bit, then talked about the feeling of being in “really awesome company” when with him: “I think it is because he is so talented and so deep-thinking, that you better keep up with him or you get lost” (Hopkins, 2016). It must have been hard not to get lost when talking with Haggard, who had views on just about everything and expressed them forcefully, just as it is easy to get lost listening to his music if you are trying too hard to reconcile the exceptional range of attitudes and vantage points on experience embedded in the lyrics. At the same time, virtually everything in his music is, distinctively and uniquely, Merle Haggard. It comes uncompromised from a depth that I believe Bonnie Owens was acknowledging with her comment about his “deep thinking.” Or, as Bob Dylan observed: “Merle Haggard has always been as deep as deep gets. Totally himself” (Fine, 2009).
“As deep as deep gets” and “totally himself” while working in a music industry riddled with conventional sentiments that can turn expression into an assembly line of premade