I haven't been watching Ken Burns's film on country music now airing on PBS because, you know, the Twins, whose "magic number" is down to two, but yesterday was a day game and I stumbled on the half-completed fifth episode while eating a late supper, watched to the end, and then filled in the first half on the replay that immediately followed. I think you can stream the episodes that have already aired here. The whole shooting match is eight episodes, 16 hours.
Episode 5 includes the film's treatment of Merle Haggard, whose biography sounds like the lyric to a country song. His Okie parents moved to Oildale, California, just outside Bakersfield, at the height of the Depression in 1934. Haggard was born at Oildale in 1937. His father died eight years later, whereupon his mother went to work as a bookkeeper. Left to his own devices while his mom worked, Haggard in his adolescence compiled a substantial rap sheet and a succession of temporary addresses at juvenile detention centers. The crimes weren't awful—truancy, burglary, petty larceny, assault—but there were lots of them, and he was eventually sentenced to hard time in San Quentin. He had also, however, been gifted a used guitar, which he taught himself to play while listening to records of country artists like Hank Williams and Bob Wills. Also, Bakersfield—this was news to me—was in the 1950s a kind of outlaw satellite to Nashville, and "the Bakersfield sound," a reaction against the over-produced Nashville sound, influenced the young Haggard, who just happened to be from there: he had made himself enough of a musician to perform in the innumerable honkytonks when not pursuing his main career as a minor, teen-aged criminal. In prison, he was for a time a member of a group of inmates planning an escape, but the leader, having heard him play in a prison band, advised him to drop out, do his time, and make something of himself in the music industry. Haggard took the advice. The break-out actually occurred, more or less as planned, but in the subsequent man hunt Haggard's mentor was captured after shooting a police officer. He was returned to San Quentin, where Haggard, before being paroled in 1960, the year he turned 23, watched as his friend was escorted across the prison yard to the execution chamber. The stardom that followed soon upon his prison release did not discharge the demons spawned during his troubled early life. From the Wikipedia article:
In 1983, Haggard and his third wife Leona Williams divorced after five stormy years of marriage. The split served as a license to party for Haggard, who spent much of the next decade becoming mired in alcohol and drug problems.
The "third wife" was only number 3 of 5, and the substance abuse, not necessarily a neat fit with his criticism of the counterculture in such Silent Majority anthems as "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me," is so pervasive in country-western bios as almost to have attained the status of a cliche. Hank Williams, who I assume received his due in Episode 1, had one divorce and a resume filled with job terminations for the same cause—"habitual drunkenness"—despite dying before his thirtieth birthday. The Wikipedia article about Williams rises to the occasion when describing his death, from heart failure in the backseat of a car being driven by one Charles Carr, who had been hired to get him to a New Year's Day concert in Canton, Ohio, after planned air travel was cancelled due to an ice storm:
At around midnight on Thursday, January 1, 1953, when they crossed the Tennessee state line and arrived in Bristol, Virginia, Carr stopped at a small all-night restaurant and asked Williams if he wanted to eat. Williams said he did not, and those are believed to be his last words. Carr later drove on until he stopped for fuel at a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia, where he realized that Williams was dead and that rigor mortis had already set in. The filling station's owner called the chief of the local police. In Williams' Cadillac, the police found some empty beer cans and unfinished handwritten lyrics.
Then of course the man in black, his amphetamines and his booze (and prison concerts, one of which had been attended by Haggard in his convict days). One of the interviewees in Episode 5 describes some lesser star, can't remember which one, who made a point of keeping his pills in one pocket and his change in another, because once in his confusion he'd "taken" thirty-five cents.
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