Merle Haggard called March 14th, 1972 the second most significant day in his life. The first was the day that his dad died when he was only nine. Friends and family members of Merle who were working on the pardon kept the effort secret from him until it was made official. When he found out, the otherwise reserved country singer was downright euphoric.
“Well, you can imagine yourself, you got this tail hanging on you, and suddenly you don’t have it anymore,” Merle said about the pardon. “It’s just wonderful not to have to walk up and say, ‘Pardon me, before I do this I want to tell you that I’m an ex-convict.’ You have to do that with any sort of legal transaction, while leaving the country, with anything of that nature. All those things went away when Ronald Reagan was kind enough to look at my case and give me a pardon. He didn’t have to do that. He could have just snubbed his nose and went on to lunch.”
And though Merle Haggard’s celebrity status most certainly helped secure the pardon—as did the fact that once he left San Quentin, he put his legal escapades behind him (well, at least mostly)—there actually was a legitimate legal case that Merle had not received proper legal representation, and unfair punishment.
“People who were in a position to examine my case, found that I was improperly convicted and had no representation because I was poor and things of that nature,” Merle recalled. “Twelve [state] supreme court justices and Governor Ronald Reagan found it right to pardon me. God, it meant everything. He gave me a second chance.”
Merle Haggard looked forward to meeting Ronald Reagan personally, and thanking him for the pardon. He got his opportunity ten years later, when Reagan was President of the United States. Reagan invited him to his Sierra Grande Ranch in California in 1982.
It was Merle Haggard’s harrowing upbringing as a poor kid of Okie parents, and his life of petty crime that put such meaning behind songs such as “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home,” and “Mama Tried.” It was Ronald Reagan’s pardon that put him on the path to becoming one of America’s most revered poet laureates, eventually being graced as a Kennedy Center Honors recipient.