By the time Merle Haggard reached a certain age, it was clear that he had begun to fatigue of some choices, and songs, he made as a younger man. Chief among them was “Okie From Muskogee,” the No. 1 hit from 1969 that, through one lens, sent his career into overdrive and, through another, was more damaging.
“It probably set it back about 40 years,” Mr. Haggard told GQ in 2012.
That song — vivid, caustic, empathetic — made Mr. Haggard the voice of a silent majority concerned that the country was being weakened by the rise of the counterculture: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don’t take no trips on LSD/We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street.”
In recent country music — especially in the first decade of the 2000s — such statements of rural pride and conservative-outsider framing have been close to the norm, but Mr. Haggard’s stance at the time was considered bold. “Okie” became a rallying cry and a target — a scar that never quite healed, always visible.
Which is a shame, because “Okie” and also the public response to it reduce Mr. Haggard — who died on Wednesday, at 79 — to caricature. Country music, especially, has a way of fixing its idols in conceptual time and space.
But Mr. Haggard, who released dozens of albums — beginning in 1965, right up until last year — is the country music titan who most resists easy categorization. He was a wildly versatile singer, songwriter and performer, with an affinity for a variety of styles — outlaw country, ballads, the Bakersfield sound, Western swing, jazz and more.
His story began in California, where he played bass in the band of Wynn Stewart, one of the architects of the Bakersfield sound, the rollicking counterproposition to Nashville’s slick mainstream. Mr. Haggard was an adept study, and that was the style he relied on at the outset of his career.
He evolved quickly. By the late 1960s into the early ’70s, he was maturing into the outlaw character he was best known for, with albums like “Mama Tried” and “Hag” showing off what would become his best known disposition: moody and tragic.
But Mr. Haggard was releasing albums at a breakneck pace, and they were a grab bag. Even as the public was embracing the outlaw persona he was developing, he was also experimenting.
Always a careful student, Mr. Haggard took an opportunity to pay tribute to one of country music’s foundational figures, Bob Wills, who was the titan of Western swing, the roadhouse country-jazz of the 1930s and ’40s that was a forefather of country music.
In 1970, Mr. Haggard released “A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills),” an affectionate album recorded with several surviving members of Mr. Wills’s band, the Texas Playboys. Compare Mr. Haggard’s singing here to that on “Okie,” released just a year prior: He’s tender, almost whimsical.
He was also curious about styles outside of country music. In 1973, he released the underappreciated live album “I Love Dixie Blues … So I Recorded Live in New Orleans,” one of his most lighthearted efforts, and one that showed him in flexible voice.
It’s possible Mr. Haggard hadn’t sounded that cheerful on an album since 1966, when he released “Just Between the Two of Us,” a duet album with Bonnie Owens, his second wife. Here is a Mr. Haggard not often heard: lovestruck, sweet, deferential.
That album aside, Mr. Haggard rarely put on a happy face — his terrain was music about the downtrodden, the aggrieved, the incarcerated, the heartbroken. And all the poses that Mr. Haggard helped innovate became familiar tropes, now worn smooth by the passage of time and by continuous refinement by generations of singers that followed him.
That Haggard, the one now permanently embedded into country music’s DNA, was just one part of him, though. Was he angry? Sure. “I’m pretty angry,” he told GQ. “I’ve always been pretty angry.” But not only that.
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