Word: haggards
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...Merle Haggard has also played the embattled public patriot. To many Americans he is still most famous for his song Okie from Muskogee. It burst on the nation in 1969, when the hippies were beginning to lose their charm and hardhats and other members of the so-called silent majority were beginning to find more and more solace in the Nixon Administration...
Okie was the making of Haggard. The single sold 264,000 copies the first year, and the album of the same name 855,000. The song put Haggard into the millionaire class, which he did not mind. It also earned him a reputation as a spokesman for the right wing, which he did. Haggard is a patriot, all right, but his own kind: instinctive, apolitical. When George Wallace sent him a feeler asking him to campaign in the Alabama Governor's re-election campaign in 1970, Haggard refused...
...White House in March 1973, and was proud to stand in the reception line next to Richard Nixon. But only two months later, he had turned bitterly pessimistic about the Nixon Administration because of Watergate and other troubles he spotted around the country. By then, crisscrossing the U.S., Haggard had already found gas hard to buy at truck stops, found too many families hard put to feed themselves. Last fall, two months before the start of the auto-industry layoffs, he came out with a song annealed to the nation's mood. If We Make It Through December...
Model Railroad. Today country-music stars may sing about riding the freights or drinking a brew, but many go home to antebellum mansions or $500,000 ranch houses, buy Cadillacs and keep houseboats around for the weekends. A trend now is toward private jets, but many country stars, Haggard included, prefer to own their own buses-huge $100,000 cruisers decked out with color TVs, recording equipment, separate quarters for star and band, sometimes even separate buses...
...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...