Merle Haggard

Merle Haggard was an American country singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist whose six-decade music career produced one of the foundational bodies of work in 20th-century American Bakersfield-sound country music — particularly his 38 Billboard Hot Country Songs number-one singles across 1966–1988 (a record that subsequently was exceeded by Conway Twitty's 40 number-one singles). He was born Merle Ronald Haggard on April 6, 1937, in Oildale, California (just north of Bakersfield). His father James Francis Haggard was a Sante Fe Railroad carpenter who had previously been a Dust Bowl Oklahoma sharecropper from Checotah, Oklahoma, and his mother Flossie Mae Harp was a homemaker. The 1946 sudden death of his father from a brain hemorrhage at age 45 shaped his subsequent later autobiographical narrative.

His teenage and early-adulthood career across 1948–1957 was shaped by his repeated juvenile-detention-and-prison incarcerations — including his 1957 California San Quentin State Prison incarceration for the December 1957 attempted burglary of the Bakersfield Fashion Cleaners restaurant. His January 1, 1959 California San Quentin State Prison New Year's Day witnessing of Johnny Cash's first San Quentin prison concert performance — across the prison-yard concert — launched his 1960 country-music career.

His late-1962 music-career launch following his March 1960 California San Quentin State Prison release on parole — and his subsequent 1962 founding of his band the Strangers — launched his 1960s American Bakersfield-sound country-music career. His 1963 first single "Skid Row" and his subsequent 1965 California Tally Records signing under producer Fuzzy Owen launched his 1965 American country-music chart breakthrough.

His 1966 first Billboard Hot Country Songs number-one single "I'm a Lonesome Fugitive" — followed by his subsequent 38 Billboard Hot Country Songs number-one singles across 1966–1988 — produced his late-1960s and 1970s American country-music commercial peak. His 1969 single "Okie from Muskogee" — released October 1969 — launched his 1970s American conservative-country-music public profile across the 1970s American counter-culture-vs-conservative-country-music political divisions. He died on April 6, 2016, at age 79, in Palo Cedro, California, of pneumonia complications.

His name Merle derives from the Old French merle meaning "blackbird." Merle was a popular American boys' name through the early-to-mid-20th century.