Nearly 50 years after his passing, 2022 Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Lefty Frizzell remains one of the indisputable pillars of country music. His influence on another country music giant, the late Merle Haggard, is both profound and clear to anyone with ears. Haggard’s vocal style developed in the 1950s when Frizzell’s impact was at its peak. Marc Eliot’s essential Haggard biography, “The Hag,” sketches the time in the ’50s when Frizzell had a personal impact on young “Hag.”
Merle Haggard was sixteen by the time he was released from the reformatory, tougher than ever and hardly reformed. Back in Oildale, Flossie still tried to put her boy on the righteous path. On September 20, 1953, she had Merle baptized at the Church of Christ. The next day, he met up with Bob Teague and they started playing guitar and singing together, like old times. The following January, Bob told Merle that Lefty Frizzell was coming back to Bakersfield, this time for a two-show, all-ages one-nighter at the Rainbow Gardens, meaning no alcohol would be served. Merle said they had to go. By now, he could precisely imitate Lefty’s voice, pitch, and phrasing and accompany himself on the guitar while doing it. His impression was so good that a laughing Teague told Merle he ought to think about doing imitations for a living.
They bought tickets and went to Lefty’s show together. This time, Merle promised himself he would see the whole performance, even if he had to walk to Bakersfield early Saturday morning to make sure he arrived on time. He planned for days what he was going to wear: he settled on khaki pants and a heavily starched white shirt he borrowed from Teague. And he didn’t have to walk the three miles to Bakersfield; Teague had since gotten a car, and he drove them both to the club.
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They arrived in time for the second sold-out show. That night at the Garden, Merle met Billy Mize, who was playing steel guitar in his own band, which opened for Frizzell. Mize was a well-known figure in town, one of the early pioneers of what was beginning to be referred to as the Bakersfield sound. He was a good singer, accomplished steel pedalist, solid bandleader, and successful songwriter. He’d written hits for Dean Martin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Walker, and Ernest Tubb, among others, and hosted a daily radio program, “The Billy Mize Show,” broadcast on the low-wattage KPMC channel 29 out of the San Joaquin Valley. Teague knew Miz also was able to get himself and Merle backstage passes. During the intermission, before it was Frizzell’s turn to go on, Teague knocked on Frizzell’s dressing room door and strode in like he was a member of the band.
Here’s how Merle remembers what happened next: “Bob asked Lefty if he’d like to meet a guy who sang like he did. He said sure. So, I was brought in.” Frizzell handed Merle his custom electric 1949 Gibson J-200, retrofitted with a custom neck and black pickguard with LEFTY FRIZZELL cut into it in gold lettering. It had beautiful body curves like a Vegas showgirl, slim at the waist with a big bottom, tinted reddish-orange like a blushing bride.
Merle was surprised and thrilled to actually hold Lefty’s guitar in his own hands — a trophy, a torch, a talisman. He slipped the leather strap over his head, reached for the pick he always carried in his shirt pocket, took a deep breath, and launched into a pitch-perfect impersonation of Frizzell doing “Always Late With Your Kisses.” Lefty, already pretty well lit, grinned, applauded lightly, and told Merle it was like listening to his own record. Merle: “Just as I finished up, one of the show’s promoters, Joe Snead, came by and told Lefty it was time to start the show, and Frizzell said, ‘I want this kid to sing a song out there before I go on.’ Snead looked at Lefty like he was crazy and said, ‘Hey, the crowd didn’t pay to hear some local yokel sing. They came to hear Lefty Frizzell.’ But Lefty refused to go on if I wasn’t allowed to sing, so he got his way … and I got to use his guitar and have his band play behind me. It was quite a thrill.”
A nervous Merle walked out onstage before a standing-room crowd of more than a thousand locals who’d come to see Lefty. As he plugged into the amplifier, he looked up and saw Frizzell’s lead guitar player, Roy Nichols. Merle knew who he was from Nichols’s days as the guitar-picking, string-bending player on all those Maddox Brothers & Rose records he and his dad heard on the radio.
“Hey, Roy,” he said. “My name’s Merle Haggard. I’m a picker and a singer. How’s it working for Lefty?” Nichols’s answer wasn’t what Merle expected.
“It ain’t worth a shit,” said the cynical, hard-drinking Nichols, his jaw clenched. “This is my last night.” With that, Nichols turned away from Merle and everybody else and, bending over the neck of his guitar, concentrated on tuning it up.
Although he had no idea what Roy was talking about, Merle was not at all thrown by what Nichols muttered. Instead, Merle admired his toughness, the way he spit out words with the same intensity he played his Telecaster. Merle then went up to the microphone, front and center, and started to sing. The audience loved him and wanted more. He sang Jimmie Rodgers’s “My Rough and Rowdy Ways” and Hank Williams’s “You Win Again” as Nichols and the other band members picked him up. When he finished, the rowdy audience roared and stomped their approval. “He just turned [that crowd] up, over, and around,” Teague said. “Some of them actually thought he was Lefty.” Merle said, “They ripped the seats out — they loved it. And I was a nobody. I went right out in front of Lefty. Everything was against me, and everything went for me.”
Merle left the stage grinning with satisfaction, waving once to the crowd before he disappeared into the wings, where a laughing Frizzell was waiting for him. Lefty patted Merle on the back, told him he’d done a fine job, then walked right past him, out onto center stage. When the crowd saw him, they erupted. Frizzell stood in his spotlight, his all-white rhinestone cowboy attire shimmering, and nodded in appreciation. He plugged in and kicked off with a rousing real-thing version of “Always Late With Your Kisses.”
Merle watched the rest of the show from the wings, mesmerized by how effortlessly Frizzell held the audience in the palm of his left hand. “I seen that and I knew that’s probably what I was going to do.”
Excerpted from “THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard” by Marc Eliot. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
