Jul 21 2010 12:00 PM
I saw Haggard profiled recently on the Evening News , seems like a fascinating person. I'll be tuning n tonight.
Merle Haggard restless life, passion for music chronicled in 'Learning to Live With Myself
BY DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
| "Merle Haggard: Learning to Live With Myself," Wednesday night at 9 on PBS Filmmaker Gandulf Hennig's documentary on Merle Haggard rings as strong and true as Merle's own songs. That's high praise, high achievement and high art. "Learning to Live With Myself," an American Masters production, talks to just about everyone in the music and Merle worlds, from Keith Richards and John Fogerty to Marty Stuart, George Jones and all of Merle's wives, past and present. At the center, it finds a restless man, still seemingly not quite at home anywhere, musing how "I won't be satisfied until I write that one song that will live forever." He may be right, too, with his implication that he doesn't have one transcending signature song. Someone else wrote "Stardust" and "White Christmas." He's written a wagonload of songs that will outlive all of us, however, or at least deserve to. Like "Mama Tried" and "Hungry Eyes." From 1966 to 1972, recalls Dwight Yoakam, pretty much every song Haggard wrote went into country-music lore. That included "Okie From Muskogee," which was widely heard as a patriotic response to the anti-war movement of the time. The more aggressive song in that vein, though, was his followup, "The Fightin' Side of Me." It's a little surprising this "American Masters" doesn't explore that point, since it touches on almost everything else about Haggard's life and music. The show digs particularly well into his early years, showing how he was pretty much a regular working-class kid until he was 9 and his father died. That set him adrift, and by the time he was a teenager, he was a petty thief headed for bigger trouble. The worst possibilities were headed off, Haggard's friends suggest, by a stint in San Quentin. Haggard himself says a week in solitary convinced him this wasn't how he wanted to spend his life. Whatever the reason, he turned things around by the simple, fortuitous fact that along the way he'd developed rudimentary musical skills. A few minutes on stage with Lefty Frizzell, his idol and the creator of more than a few musical twists that can still be heard in Haggard's songs and performance, got him hooked. He knocked around country bars for a few years, always wondering whether he'd be forced to get a real job, until he was "discovered." Almost 50 years later, he's playing a better class of country bars, traveling constantly in a bus he calls both his refuge and the "shark cage." His songs are as restless as the man himself, and this documentary gets him talking about how music saved him. Not just his own, but the music that came before, like Frizzell, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Bob Wills. He's an ambassador for the past and its importance. This documentary should play the same role for Merle Haggard. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... z0uLCGrktx |
Hinckley gave it 4 Stars