Merle Haggard's Oildale Boxcar

Merle Haggard was born in nineteen thirty-seven in a converted Santa Fe Railroad boxcar in Oildale, a Kern County community just north of Bakersfield where his parents had come from Checotah, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl years. His father had converted the boxcar into a house. Oildale in the late thirties was dense with Dust Bowl families who had made the same drive west on Highway Sixty-Six and found not the promised land but the back end of an agricultural labor economy that wanted their work and despised their presence.

His father died when Merle was nine. By his teens he was drifting, in and out of trouble with the law, and by his early twenties he had worked himself into a robbery charge serious enough to land him in San Quentin. He was there in nineteen fifty-eight, the sources give that year with a caveat that it has not been confirmed across two independent accounts, when Johnny Cash played the prison. Haggard watched from the audience. What he took from that performance, if his later comments are any guide, was less the music than the fact of a man standing in front of an audience and performing his own experience without apology.

Haggard came back to Bakersfield. He and Buck Owens, who had grown up in a similarly displaced Dust Bowl family, developed what the music press would eventually call the Bakersfield Sound: amplified, electric, Fender Telecaster-driven country music that sounded nothing like the polished orchestrations Nashville was producing and everything like what it actually sounded like in the bars along Edison Highway when the people playing it had actually been broke and afraid and locked up.

The Bakersfield Sound was not an alternative to Nashville. It was the record of a specific population, the children of the Dust Bowl migration, making music out of the experience Nashville had no vocabulary for. Haggard could perform a caricature when an audience wanted one. When he was not performing caricatures, the experience underneath was real.