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Up in the hills behind Bakersfield, Haggard has a $700,000 mansion surrounded by 180 acres of grassland and tan, windswept vistas. The property includes an electrified gate, a moat, a swimming pool and a barbecue pit of roughly bullring dimensions. Inside the house are enough walkie-talkies, mobile telephones, cameras, video-tape machines, tape recorders, amplifiers, speakers and other electronic gadgets to keep Haggard occupied for years. He is happiest, however, tinkering with his $50,000 model railroad: 250 freight cars, 35 locomotives and a scale replica of the Bakersfield terminal. Its main line is a kid's dream that runs through the living room, across the sun deck, through the sauna, a bathroom and a bedroom, and then out onto a trestle high above the rear patio.
Workin' Man. Life was not always that kind of a joyride for Merle Haggard, even if trains did always seem to play an important part. He was born April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield in a converted refrigerator car less than 100 yards from a heavily used Southern Pacific railroad main line. His father, who had brought the family West after fire destroyed their farm in Checotah, Okla., was a $40-a-week yardman. This and other highlights in Haggard's life are easy to trace in his songs.
Raised the son of a railroad man
Who rode 'em till he died.
I'd like to live like my daddy did,
But there's no more trains to ride.
Daddy died when Merle was nine, ending the ball games and the fishing trips and turning the boy into an aimless rebel.
The first thing I remember knowin'
was a lonesome whistle blowin',
And a youngon 's dream of growin' up to ride
on a freight train leavin' town,
not knowin' where I'm bound,
and no one could change my mind, but Mama tried.
While his mother Flossie was working as a $35-a-week bookkeeper, Merle was dropping out of the ninth grade to take any job he could find—pitching hay, sacking potatoes, roughnecking it on oil rigs. He had an easy sexuality, and the girls came around without his asking, just as the "snuff queens"—the country term for groupies—swarm around him at concerts now. At 16, he set up housekeeping in Eugene, Ore., with one of the girls. It lasted three months, and when it broke up, he went back to Bakersfield on a freight. And he ran into trouble with the law.
So I do life in prison for the wrongs I've done
But I pray every night for death to come
My life will be a burden every day
If I could die, my pain might go away.
Haggard ended up his stay in San Quentin as a model prisoner. He worked hard in the prison textile mill. "When I got out, they gave me $15 and a bus ticket home." Once back in Bakersfield, Merle dug ditches, and he sang.
I've been a workin 'man
Dang near all my life . . .
I'll drink my beer in a tavern,
Sing a little bit of these workin 'man blues.