Merle Haggard Biography

Great works of art often seem to create themselves. In the case of Roots, Vol.1,Merle Haggard's follow up to his critically acclaimed Anti debut If I Could Only Fly, it was more like spontaneous combustion. This stunning exercise in classic country form resulted from the chance discovery that Norman Stephens, original guitarist for Haggard's lifelong idol Lefty Frizzell, lived just miles from Haggard's California home. Within days of their initial meeting, Haggard and Stephens were recording together, revisiting the songs and striving to evoke the almost mythic atmosphere of Lefty's era. Roots marks a distinctive and unparalleled upshift in Haggard's musical life--a journey backwards that ends in the future. Featuring numerous Frizzell classics, a pair of Hank Williams tunes and two from another Norm Stephens cohort, Hank Thompson, the Haggard and Stephens collaboration manages to not merely encapsulate but invigorate and extend honky tonk tradition.

Norm Stephen's distinctive guitar style helped Frizzell make country music history--simultaneously placing four records in the Billboard country chart Top Five (a still-unrivaled feat). Drafted in mid-1951, just as Frizzell's star threatened to eclipse even that of Hank Williams Sr., Stephens eventually returned from the service and did a stint with Western swing/honky tonk legend Hank Thompson. Weary after years of relentless touring, he retired, stashing his guitar away under a bed. Haggard changed all that: "I hadn't finished my life until I done my tribute to Lefty," Haggard said, "he meant so much to me, and here's the guitar player who was a big a part of the sound that influenced me at the very beginning. Norm's too cool a guy to come up to me and say 'hey I'm the guy who played on the Lefty records. ' So, we finally run into each other and the end result of the situation is this album that I call Roots."

The album represents an extraordinary confluence of events and personalities. The unleashing of Stephens' too-long-penned-in artistry and Haggard's return to a frame of mind that doesn't include "Okie From Muskogee" was a profound liberation. There's a shared sense of release and an intense emotional involvement with the songs that are evident in the bands flawless technique and in Hag's vocals. Clear toned, utterly relaxed, his voice conveys an eerie, almost spiritual return to the sense of awe and wonder that elated him as a 14 year old Lefty fan, the igniting spark of a romance with country music that's driven him non-stop for five decades. Along the way a growing tide of obligatory repetition at times dulled his senses, but Stephens presence completely erases that. To avoid any hint of the routine, the album was recorded not in Haggard's Shadetree studio, but in his home. "We took the old microphones and got ourselves set up in a room in my house." Haggard explained. "It had a funny shaped roof that allowed the sound to go up and away and also gave some wood to it, and some room noise, which is something like what they used to get out of Jim Beck's studio in Dallas. So we went in there and recorded in the same manner Beck did, and the sound, well, it's just setting there naked so to speak. There's none of that crap that we've all become used to hearing on records nowadays."

Roots is neither rote nostalgia nor connect-the-dots tribute; it is an elevated form of artistic expression with a presence of its own, and the Strangers, particularly steel man Norm Hamlet, pianist Doug Colosio and fiddler-mandolinist Abe Manuel Jr. (son of another long time Frizzell accompanist), have risen to the occasion with an equally reverent restraint that's resulted in an mix of creative rediscovery and pursuit of simplicity. But this doesn't mean surrendering originality--three new Hag tunes are featured, "Tender Heart" "More Than My Old Guitar" and the wild "Runaway Mama" with its fiendishly distorted mandolin lead and sucker-punch percussion, all state emphatically that Haggard is far from throwing in the towel. "The three that I wrote are trying to fit in with what are very special songs to me, " Haggard said, "My interest caused me to rise to the occasion and reach for the stars, so to speak."

There's a weird web of fated coincidence, almost an inevitability around this. Haggard has done some of his most important work with such homages--notably re-assembling Bob Wills Texas Playboys for his historic 1970 Tribute To The Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World--and here not only Hag, but the entire band "reaches for the stars" and in a process of simplification and unity reach an previously untrammeled artistic plateau. Roots comes at a moment when popular interest in traditional hillbilly and folk is at a new high, and there are few singers able to take on this material with the authority and style that Merle Haggard commands. "I'm so happy with it--'Roots' strikes a different nerve." Haggard said. "It has a different sort of sound, nobody's trying to out play anybody, the twin guitar work just dances along, and I enjoy listening to this more than anything else I've done in a long time."