Word: haggardly
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...Haggard's biography is one way in which there is more Woody Guthrie than Bull Connor in him: it's the perfect Grapes of Wrath tale of a family migrating from Oklahoma to the San Fernando Valley during the Depression, carrying what they could, nearly starving, making it through by hard work and a strict refusal to accept charity from anyone...
Leaving home at 14, Haggard stole cars and drank, basically--bumming around the country for five years. He finally ended up doing a couple of years in San Quentin. (Drunk, he had tried to burglarize a cafe which wasn't even closed. He says prison frightened him into "reforming...
This is where Haggard seems to have gotten his orientation and his songs again and again echo themes of loneliness (rather than alienation), alcohol (rather than drugs), and poverty (for which hard work and a sense of dignity rather than social awareness is the remedy). Singing about hobos and prisons, Haggard feels like a protest singer, a spokesman for the working man who has his pride or the railroad bum who has his dreams...
...spread to the northeast and the west coast, it showed an even greater propensity for being co-opted than rock music had. By now, the vast majority of country and western music has gone Glen Campbell--commercial pop with a reference to ol' Ma and Pa thrown in. Merle Haggard is virtually alone in holding on to the original forms...
...Haggard himself almost seems self-conscious about his unpretentious image. While his producers play on the political Haggard (not allowing him to record a song he wrote about an inter-racial love affair, pushing a "he's been through it all" product), he himself determinedly shuns the life-style of many Nashville stars, who say "I'm just a country boy" and spend their vacations in Las Vegas. His friends are the friends he had before he went to prison; he goes fishing and drives beat-up cars. He cultivates "success won't change...