![]() ![]() In 1934, James Haggard and his wife Flossie Mae (nee Harp), like the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, quit the worn-out soil of Oklahoma to find work in California. His family background was an archetypal Dust Bowl story. But Haggard was an altogether more complicated and interesting man than that status might suggest. ![]() Popular, successful, highly influential upon the genre and critically admired both within and beyond it, he also acquired the status of a spokesman for his core audience, his songs Okie from Muskogee and The Fightin’ Side of Me appearing to rally blue-collar Americans round Old Glory and old-fashioned values. Merle Haggard, who has died aged 79, was one of the most resonant figures in country music for almost half a century.
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