M

The singer was in San Quentin's audience for a Johnny Cash show.
By ROBERT HILBURN
LOS ANGELES TIMES
ERLE HAGGARD, THE COUNTRYmusic star who really did turn 21 in prison, just like it says in one of his songs, figures it cost the IRS nearly $100,000 the day an agent came to his ranch near Redding, Calif., to try to figure out what goes into writing a hit.
Haggard's tax return was apparently kicked out by the computer for too many business deductions and the agent wanted the songwriter to show him how the 200-acre spread in the mountains helped him do his work.
During a walk around the grounds, Haggard explained how a creek inspired one song, a flower bed led to another and a bulldog jump-started a third.
"Finally, this fellow looks at me and says, 'Why, Mr. Haggard, everything you do is a write-off,' and he started pointing out other things I should have declared," the songwriter says, laughing so hard his whole body shakes.
"What he saw was that writing for me is an impulse. I don't sit down with a pencil and paper and try to come up with songs. I look for songs in the world around me."
That world runs through Haggard's songs.
Easy to identify with
Listen to his "White Line Fever" and you can picture being on the bus with him night after night, watching the highway lines roll by, or listen to "Tulare Dust" and you can relive with him the longing a boy in the San Joaquin Valley had for the glamour of the big city. Then listen to the gritty "Big City" and you understand why he retreated to the calm countryside.
In his early album cover photos, Haggard had the rugged good looks and charisma of a young Johnny Cash. Now he's 67, and lines cross his face like stretches of barbed wire, and there is a story behind each of them. Restlessness and home, lust and devotion, heartache and good times, protest and patriotism -- all have etched his life, and his songs.
Country music tends to be so sentimental and homespun it's easy to stumble into self-parody, but Haggard has brought a freshness to the themes that places him alongside Hank Williams and Willie Nelson as one of the greatest country music writers.
"There are lots of people who have written hits, but most songs don't stick with us because you know and I know and the songwriter knows he's just telling us about something that never really happened. But then you listen to Hank Williams' 'I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You),' and everybody knows this ol' boy had his heart stepped on more than a few times. That's what I've always wanted people to feel when they hear my songs."
Haggard estimates he has written 10,000 songs, but finds only a fraction of them worth recording. Most of the great ones didn't start flowing until he got a tip from one of his musical heroes, Johnny Cash.
San Quentin
He first saw Cash when the Man in Black played San Quentin prison in the late '50s while Haggard was a prisoner there. Years later, when Haggard started turning out country hits himself, he met Cash and mentioned he had seen him at San Quentin.
"John looked at me and said, 'That's funny, Merle, because I don't remember you being on the show,'" Haggard says with a grin.
"So, I told him, 'I wasn't on the show. I was in the audience.'"
They had a good laugh, but Haggard says Cash gave him advice that changed his life.
The young singer told Cash his greatest fear was that some tabloid would reveal his prison background and kill his career. Write a song about those days yourself, Cash told him, and fans will love your honesty.
No. 1 hit
That led to "Mama Tried," which spent four weeks at No. 1 on the country charts in 1968 and remains a signature song. It's a salute to his mother and a lament about how he, as a restless teenager, refused to follow her advice.
Like so many Haggard songs, it tells its story so simply that it's hard to see the craft involved.
"And I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole.
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried."
Every line in the song is true except "life without parole."
"I guess I was just trying to make it all a bit more dramatic," Haggard says over a late lunch of black-eyed peas with his wife and two children.
"But there was a bit of truth to it. When they sent me to prison, they sent me to maximum security. On my papers, they wrote 'incorrigible.' I didn't know if I would ever get out. That's a feeling you never forget, so it came to me when I was writing the song."
By 17, Haggard had spent two years in reform school. Three years later he and a friend were arrested during an attempted burglary in which they were so "juiced up" they didn't realize the cafe was still open the night they tried to break in the back door. He aggravated things by fleeing the jail, though he maintains he was encouraged by guards to think he was free to go.
Reality hits
The judge sentenced him to San Quentin for a maximum of 15 years. He began to realize that he was going to spend his entire life behind bars if he didn't change his ways. And when he saw how the inmates went wild for Johnny Cash at that fabled prison concert, he began to remember how he'd daydreamed of a music career.
Learning to duck trouble, Haggard was paroled after three years (later pardoned by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan) and began following up on those dreams.
As a child, Haggard had been exposed to a lot of music, from Bing Crosby to Hank Williams. He later fell under the spell of the rock 'n' roll of Elvis Presley, the country blues of Jimmie Rodgers, the western swing of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and, most important, Lefty Frizzell, one of the most influential of all country music singers. Haggard taught himself to play guitar on an instrument handed down by an older brother and became so good after his prison days, he got jobs in Bakersfield and Las Vegas clubs. Singing was the next step. Even as a teenager, when he sang songs he'd heard on the radio, adults complimented him, suggesting he sounded "just like the record."
Wrote own songs
Once he started singing in clubs, he realized the best way to distinguish himself was to write his own material. And he says the years of playing guitar helped him greatly in doing that.
"I'd recommend anyone who wants to write songs to learn to play an instrument because if you only know three chords, you can only write a song with three chords and that's fine, but if you want to compete with the Willie Nelsons and the Hoagy Carmichaels, you're going to have to know more than three chords. The more chords you know the more choices you have when you start to write melodies."