Only Merle Haggard. Never one who was shy or too scared to speak his mind, Merle was good friends with Ray Benson, frontman of Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel, who recalled a great story about ...

The three songs below are popular enough, but the truths in their lyrics are hard to hear. Revisit these three brutally ...

Sixty-eight years ago today, Johnny Cash played his first-ever prison concert and unknowingly changed the country music world.

Merle Haggard was an escape artist. The future country music legend broke out of juvenile hall and prison 17 times by his own count as a teenager and young man. But his greatest escape was getting out ...

Hailed as "the Poet of the Common Man," there's no question that the late Merle Haggard's reputation as one of the most important singer-songwriters in country music was well-deserved. Now, nearly ten ...

Merle Haggard initially encountered Blaze Foley’s music when he cut “If I Could Only Fly” with Willie Nelson in 1987, after which the country icon became one of the late Austin troubadour’s biggest ...

They stood for decades as Bakersfield's two greatest country music stars, and long after their deaths, they still wear those crowns. Merle Haggard and Buck Owens each came from hardscrabble beginnings ...

In honor of one of Bakersfield's most famous sons, the Haggard Boxcar Music Festival, a grand birthday celebration for the iconic country music legend Merle Haggard, returns after a four-year hiatus ...

Willie Nelson, 92, has a history of making entire albums that revive and reimagine the works of single songwriters. And he's done it again. Nelson just dropped Workin’ Man: Willie Sings Merle, his ...

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. This week marks the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid, the country music concert founded by Willie Nelson as a fundraiser to benefit farmers. Held in Champaign, ...

A Christmas miracle. In 2021, Cody Johnson released his A Cody Johnson Christmas album, which is a ten-song project full of holiday classics, including Merle Haggard’s "If We Make It Through December.