Merle Haggard at EnCana Events Centre

Country music legend Merle Haggard will be at the EnCana Events Centre on Wednesday, March 10.

Tickets are $65.00 and $55.00 (additional convenience fees and service charges may apply) and go on sale Friday, January 22 at 10am. You can purchase tickets at the Tiger Box Office Plus, Dawson Co-op High Performance Ticket Outlet, 1-877-339-TIXX, or www.dawsonco-optickets.com.

If the question were asked, “Who forged the genre that is known today as ‘modern country music’?,” only a tiny group of country immortals could step forward to share the spotlight. One, out of that select handful, would be Merle Haggard. Merle wasn’t in the delivery room on the morning country music was born; it simply seems like he was. And you won’t hear anybody refer to him as the father of country music. But many will swear he’s at least its godfather.

Haggard’s life path has never been easy, nor has much of it been pretty, as aired in his 1981 book, Sing Me Back Home. His childhood years were spent in Bakersfield, California, and the death of his father, when Merle was just nine years old, became the catalyst that led to a squandered youth. At the same time, his love for the wandering songs of such as Jimmie Rodgers, lead to an errant passion for the gleaming, endless railroad tracks and the siren song of slow freights and hobo jungles. And, along the way, to numerous brushes with the law.

Unfocused, unruly and unsettled, Merle learned early to walk the mean streets. As a teenager he took on every unskilled job that would have him, from oil field roustabout to hay-pitcher to short order cook. And that was the bright side. He also saw the insides of various penal institutions for crimes ranging from burglary to auto theft and even to escape. Before he had reached the age of 21, and not long after he married his first wife, Leona, he was serving time in the notorious San Quentin Penitentiary, thanks to a bungled attempt at burglarizing a tavern. But the three year stretch within those gray and desolate walls, including a stint in solitary confinement (for making home brew), became the experience that finally changed his perspective and the spark that turned his head around. He abruptly assumed the role of a model prisoner and was paroled in 1960. (Over a decade later, in 1972, California’s governor Ronald Reagan granted him a full pardon.)

Singer, songwriter, remarkable musician, bandleader and historian, Haggard may well be the most well-rounded country talent ever to take the stage in front of a microphone or an audience. Over his career, he has been the pulse of an ever-lonesome fugitive, in desperate flight from the prison walls of mediocrity. His has been the voice of the Okie with an attitude, fueled by a well-stoked fire of unflinching convictions and bone-deep beliefs. In his music he has hung his soul out on the line, baring himself in those songs clawed out of the soil and bonded together with grit and spit. As a result, that music is not only resounded in such typical entertainment channels as radio, records and concert dates, but has also been integrated into the university classroom setting where students examine the sociological implications of his works.

His accomplishments would lead some to sum him up with a catchall cliché like “legend,” but legends are about the past, about those who are about to be swept off into some dusty corner record bin somewhere. Haggard can’t be pinpointed in the past. And he won’t be found rockin’ and whittlin’ with a shoebox full of yesterday’s memories. His music speaks to country audiences today, while his mind and talents flirt with a new millennium.

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