One of the year’s best albums is a Merle Haggard tribute called “Best Troubador”—the odd spelling is deliberate—from the singer-songwriter Will Oldham, working under his stage name, Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Oldham, who is forty-seven, specializes in a ragged, old-time hillbilly style, often updated with ladles full of irony. But on “Best Troubador” he sounds as serious as heartbreak; the album lacks even the hint of playfulness that lurked about Haggard’s most earnest performances. Oldham performs living-room-still versions of songs selected mostly from outside of Haggard’s classic period, relying heavily on album tracks rather than big hits. His readings of cult favorites “The Day the Rains Came,” “Roses in Winter” and “If I Could Only Fly”— a Merle-associated Blaze Foley song, included here in a recording that would barely qualify as a proper demo—are so delicate and mysterious that you fear a stiff breeze might blow them away forever.
It’s a marvellous tribute, but not one likely to inspire waves of Haggard converts. There will be other tribute albums—Willie Nelson, Haggard’s old friend and collaborator, already has one in the can. And at the close of his latest album, “God’s Problem Child,” Nelson makes a promise about Haggard: “He Won’t Ever Be Gone.” It’s a nice song and a nicer thought. But is it wishful thinking?
Popular music rarely lasts, even when its creators build it for that purpose—as Haggard typically did, with one eye on the past and another on the ages. Such endurance depends on external factors. Johnny Cash, Haggard’s friend and occasional recording partner, had a network-TV series and a late-in-life resurgence that was popular with alternative rockers, as well as an Oscar-winning movie made about his life, in 2005. Haggard’s working-class persona proved mostly resistant to crossover appeal, and his counter-to-the-counterculture political associations always muted his broader appreciation. The question of a lasting and widespread musical legacy remains wide open.
In April, on Haggard’s birthday—which was also a year to the day since he’d died, at the age of seventy-nine—eighteen thousand people gathered for an event called “Sing Me Back Home: The Music of Merle Haggard,” at Bridgestone Arena, in Nashville. The several generations of fans present already knew both the words to Haggard’s songs and his roles in country history: blue-collar poet and proto-outlaw, devotee of idiosyncrasy, at once a follower and advancer of tradition. Performances proceeded briskly but without much sense of celebration or loss; participating artists had clearly been instructed to eschew sharing any Haggard stories or memories in the interest of time. Merle’s mourners came, sang, and went, all in a tearless rush.
A few contemporary radio stars showed up to pay their respects. Dierks Bentley sang Haggard’s Nixon-era Christmas song, and biggest pop hit, “If We Make It Through December”; Kacey Musgraves was an ideal match for Haggard’s whimsical “Rainbow Stew.” Honky-tonk bros Chris Jansen and Jake Owen palled around to “Footlights,” a bitter midlife-crisis anthem, and Miranda Lambert performed “Misery and Gin,” a Haggard-identified weeper that she’s turned to frequently onstage through the years. But most of the thirty or so performers on hand were of an older vintage, either just past their hit-making prime, like Toby Keith and Ronnie Dunn, or well past it, like Bobby Bare, Loretta Lynn, Connie Smith, Tanya Tucker, and Hank Williams, Jr. Lynn, who concluded the first half of the program, needed assistance to make it to the microphone—she recently announced the cancellation of all of her shows for the rest of the year while she recovers from a stroke—then delivered a devastating version of Haggard’s most recorded number, “Today I Started Loving You Again.” Willie Nelson closed the show. He sounded a bit frail at first—he’d cancelled concerts earlier in the year due to illness—but gained power as he traded vocal and guitar lines with Keith Richards on “Reasons to Quit.”
Climaxing with Lynn and Nelson, ages eighty-five and eight-four, respectively, was as it should be. But it also underscored a generational gap that was apparent all evening. The torch for Haggard’s continued relevance is likely to be carried most brightly, at least initially, by Americana artists, old-school country acts, and roots-favoring rockers rather than by today’s mainstream country stars. At “Sing Me Back Home,” the Avett Brothers did a spry take on “Mama Tried,” and Lucinda Williams steamed up Haggard’s eighties hit “Goin’ Where the Lonely Go.” John Mellencamp rendered “White Line Fever” as a fever dream, and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons transformed “Working Man Blues” into an actual slide-guitar blues workout. Haggard's appeal to rockers is nothing new: “Mama Tried” was covered by the Grateful Dead at Woodstock. But it will be a disappointment, and a worrying sign for the country genre, if his songs are not resurrected in modern styles for a modern generation of country-radio fans, too.
Haggard’s music didn’t sound like that of his forebears any more than Miranda Lambert’s or Luke Bryan’s sounds like Haggard’s. But by including plenty of classic country songs, updated, Haggard made sure that his new-fashioned music was heard as the freshest installment in a still-vital narrative. This process—changes, connected—is the glue that has held country together for nearly a century, no matter how radically its sounds, and the material conditions of its audience, have changed. Haggard’s best-known song, “Okie from Muskogee,” has launched countless other I’m-proud-to-be-country songs since its release, but a twenty-first-century take on his “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” for instance, could speak to class anxieties that remain paramount to country listeners but which have gone mostly AWOL on country radio. A randy Haggard romp like “Living with the Shades Pulled Down” would fit right in on contemporary-country stations, but the revitalization of any number of heartbroken Haggard ballads might help remind listeners why country used to be a format known for playing grownup music.
There are plenty of youngish Haggard-adoring stars out there. The Americana-country rocker Sturgill Simpson hasn’t released any Haggard material of his own, reinvented or otherwise, but he has spoken passionately about Haggard’s music in interviews. The night after “Sing Me Back Home,” the Cuban country-rock band the Mavericks played at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and rendered the once controversial “Okie from Muskogee” as the instant sing-along party-starter it’s more recently become. The country-soul sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer’s new album, “Not Dark Yet,” features a harrowing version of Haggard’s “Silver Wings.” Angaleena Presley, Miranda Lambert’s partner in the Pistol Annies, includes a track in conversation with “Mama Tried”—“Mama I Tried”—on her latest solo album, “Wrangled.” And the country superstar Blake Shelton has gone out of his way over the years to make sure that several of his contestants on “The Voice” sang Merle Haggard songs.
Merle Haggard won’t be forgotten anytime soon. The U.S. House of Representatives just voted to rededicate a Bakersfield, California, post office in his honor. Rolling Stone put him atop of its list of the “100 Greatest Country Artists of All Time.” But such things don’t necessarily translate to a legacy by themselves. For Haggard to enjoy an ongoing and active appreciation, he will need to be more than remembered and admired. He will need to have his songs performed live and recorded, over and over, in twenty-first-century styles and by mainstream radio stars as often as by Americana acts—in a fashion similar to what Haggard himself once did to insure the legacies of Bob Wills, Jimmie Rodgers, and Lefty Frizzell. This is not nostalgic but traditional: backward-glancing and forward-looking at once. Think of the difference, say, between hanging onto your late grandmother’s cookbook because you loved her or keeping it because you also know you can tweak some of her best old recipes for dinner next week.
A key to the continued relevance of Johnny Cash is that, like Hank Williams before him, he had a music-making child: Rosanne Cash, who is not only an innovative hit-maker but a popular ambassador for her family's traditions. Haggard’s son Ben is only twenty-four, but he became a member of his dad’s band, the Strangers, around the time he could first drive—and he’s already a better guitarist than his dad ever was. (That’s him backing Nelson on “He Won’t Ever Be Gone.”) He’s also a fantastic, distinctive vocalist. His voice is pitched somewhat higher than his father’s, and it quivers evocatively in a relaxed, modern style. His several powerful versions of his dad’s songs are popular on YouTube, if not yet on the radio; his début album will be produced, he has said, by Sturgill Simpson.
At the “Sing Me Back Home” concert, Ben Haggard opened the show with one of his dad’s songs from the nineteen-eighties, called “What Am I Gonna Do with the Rest of My Life.” “I got whiskey I could drink, that would help me not to think, about you leaving,” Ben sang, using a song that his dad had recorded before he was born to express the quite different ways he was feeling that night. Ben Haggard, at least, seems to grasp what many of his peers have yet to see: Merle Haggard’s songs may be old tools, but there’s plenty of use left in them, and a future to build.
