Merle Haggard Keeps It Honest

8/9/2007 Stephen L. Betts Country music legend Merle Haggard says another legendary performer - Johnny Cash - told him that his entire life, including the three years he served at San Quentin Penitentiary for a botched robbery, needed to be in his song lyrics for all to hear. Merle admits, "I was bull-headed about my career, but Cash said I should talk about it. That way the tabloids wouldn't be able to. I said I didn't want to do that and he said, 'It's just owning up to it.'" In a feature for the Charleston (SC) Post and Courier, writer Keith Ryan Cartwright says it was Johnny who encouraged Merle to infuse his music with the most valuable commodity of all: honesty. With that advice, Merle "wrote and recorded music that felt right to him, including political statements ("The Fightin' Side of Me," "I Wonder if They Ever Think of Me," "If We Make it Through December") and blunt, yet eloquent ... songs about his five marriages ("Things Aren't Funny Anymore," "Always Wanting You," "Someday When Things Are Good"). "Life has been peaks and valleys all the way for me," says Merle. "The only way I know to come out of the valleys is to write my way out. Whatever kind of music you're doing, if you're doing something with some honesty and truth to it, people will recognize that ... I believed that people are looking for honesty, and that's what I'm trying to put across."