Poet of the Common Man
Merle Haggard has always been a maverick from the start. Similar to Johnny Cash, he was not one that you can pigeon-hole in terms of musical style and concepts. While both legends sang for the unfortunates, their approaches were different. Cash writes songs based on his personal encounters with people. Merle Haggard, on the other hand, created his own characters.
Though they’re fictitious, Haggard’s characters represent real-life struggles. In a sense, the majority of his characters were his extensions. He taps into his own perspective of reality, then skillfully weave them into his music. Unlike Cash’s sometimes ambiguous wordings, Haggard prefer bluntness and leave no room to mince words.
If Johnny Cash was the embodiment of the underdog’s stories, Merle Haggard was the utterance of the silent majority. He wrote what he deemed people would think. Take his Fightin’ Side of Me and Okie from Muskogee as classic examples. In fact, when he played Okie from Muskogee in a concert in Dayton, Ohio, the Atlantic Monthly reported that people were “suddenly they are on their feet, berserk, waving flags and stomping and whistling and cheering … and for those brief moments the majority isn’t silent anymore.”
As expected, Haggard’s boldness to be the mouthpiece for certain people made him a target of hate. In an interview with Quarter Notes magazine in 1981, he expressed his sentiment that Okie made him appear narrow-minded against hippies. Still, he had no regrets as he knew the importance of getting those words out.