First-rate PBS profile manages to give us fresh insights into Haggard
| Friday, Jul 16 2010 12:06 PM
Last Updated Friday, Jul 16 2010 12:06 PM
How to watch
"Merle Haggard: Learning to Live with Myself," for the PBS series "American Masters"
When: 9 to 10:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Both PBS stations that air in Kern County will debut the program: KVPT, Channels 18 and 34; and KCET, Channels 10 and 28
At this point in Bakersfield's long-running correspondence with Merle Haggard, it may not be possible to learn anything new about the city's most prolific and honored poet, certainly in terms of names and places and dates. What Haggard has not told us about himself in song or interview over a half-century of public life, countless biographers and critics have rushed to fill in.
So it is with a certain degree of surprise and delight that viewers might consider Gandulf Hennig's new documentary on the singer-songwriter, "Merle Haggard: Learning to Live with Myself," a film for PBS' "American Masters" series. The program airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KCET and KVPT.
Hennig, who followed Haggard around for the better part of three years, manages to elicit some freshness out of a story that Haggard fans will have heard many times: his Oklahoma heritage and Bakersfield/Oildale roots; the life-changing grief of his father's premature death; his turn toward restlessness and delinquency; his legend-making incarceration; and his partial (but never quite complete) salvation by way of music.
No new revelation is more telling about the man than this admission: Even at 73, Haggard says he suspects that one ultimate and defining song may still lie somewhere deep within him.
"Fortunately, there's a feeling in my gut that says 'you haven't written that one song yet -- the one that's gonna live forever,'" Haggard says. "I'll be satisfied only when I think I've written that song, you know, and that may never happen. But then again, it might. So it may be the main component that keeps me alive."
That disclosure is likely to baffle fans who believe that Haggard's huge catalog -- including 33 No. 1 songs -- absolves him of any further requirements as a working performer or writer. But Haggard has aptly described the essence of what makes great artists great: the inability to ever truly and fully be satisfied. There's still an extraordinary, unrealized song somewhere in Haggard, and he will always be listening for it.
Along the way in "Learning to Live with Myself," we hear from friends, comrades and fellow musicians, including Robert Duvall, John Fogerty, Kris Kristofferson, Marty Stuart, Dave Alvin, Billy Gibbons, Dwight Yoakam, Keith Richards, Tanya Tucker, Gerald Haslam, Buddy Alan Owens, the late Bonnie Owens, and Lillian Haggard Rea Hoge.
Bakersfield High School teacher/historian Ken Hooper even drops in to share Haggard's dismal ninth-grade report card.
The old sights and sounds are all there: The boyhood home in Oildale that Haggard's father fashioned from a converted boxcar; the Southern Pacific railroad track a stone's throw to the north; the spot on State Street where Haggard and friends staged their final, fateful act of drunken larceny; and more.
"There are a lot of us that they called outlaws back in the beginning, but Merle was a real outlaw," Kristofferson says in the film.
Referring to the challenges associated with the fact and myth of Haggard's criminal past -- the singer served almost two years in San Quentin -- Stuart notes: "His legend casts a long shadow .... and that's got to be tough to deal with sometimes. And the only way to fight that is new creativity, to keep following what got him there in the first place."
But the greatest insights come from interviews with Haggard himself, both recent and archival, as well as his wife, Theresa, and their two children, Jenessa and guitar prodigy Ben.
"I'm living proof that things go wrong in America, and I'm also living proof that things can go right," Haggard declares at one point.
Hennig didn't know much about Haggard until he started work on his 2004 documentary, "Fallen Angel: Gram Parsons," and learned that the late, great Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers frontman idolized the Bakersfield songwriter. Hennig looked into Haggard's story -- and his inscrutable persona -- and knew he had the makings of a great character study. But Hennig makes no claims about having "solved" the Haggard puzzle.
"It would be almost boring if at the end of the film you'd felt like you'd figured him out," Hennig says. "The closer you get to him in this film, the more enigmatic he becomes.
"I was never that much interested in the biographical stuff, because so much has been written about that already -- the running away, the prison time, all that. I was more interested to see how those experiences affected him and his art. And those things still live inside him. You get the sense that whatever he has achieved, it's not enough for him, because of what he did. And it'll always be there, whether he likes it or not."
Archival footage includes an opening snippet of Haggard with Johnny Cash on Cash's 1960s musical variety show and with fellow Bakersfield Sound innovator Buck Owens on "Buck Owens' Ranch."
Leona Williams, Haggard's third wife, provides some of the film's most amusing moments. At one point, she quotes Bonnie Owens (Haggard's second wife, and a remarkably understanding bridesmaid at the Haggard-Williams nuptials) as having warned her: "You know, Merle only stays in love about five years." Haggard and Williams were, in fact, married five years.
Haggard has exceeded that previous standard -- he and wife Theresa are closing in on 17 years. His concerns for his family's welfare, poignantly expressed in the film by daughter Janessa, are clearly foremost in his mind.
Haggard is a cancer survivor, having had a tumor removed from his lung at the end of 2008, a turn of events that undoubtedly contributes to his feelings of mortality. But he's back at work just the same, touring in support of his first new solo album in almost three years, "I Am What I Am." (Haggard's funny, wistful new song from that recording, "Pretty When It's New," is featured prominently in the film.)
Perhaps in a sense he has no choice but to keep working. Music, after all, probably kept him a free man. That's a debt he must feel obliged to continue repaying.
"I would've become a lifetime criminal," Haggard admits in the film, "if music hadn't saved my ass."
But it's not just a vague sense of obligation that keeps Haggard attentive to his craft. It's passion.
"You can learn all there is and look around and there'll be something else you'll wanna learn," Haggard says. "... (There's) a never-dying fire that guitar kindles in your soul. Makes you want to try."
