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N0KFQ > TODAY 01.01.17 16:10l 53 Lines 2588 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 17606_N0KFQ
Read: GUEST
Subj: Today in History - Jan 1
Path: IW8PGT<CX2SA<N0KFQ
Sent: 170101/1355Z 17606@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ6.0.13
1958
Inmate Merle Haggard hears Johnny Cash play San Quentin State
Prison
"Folsom Prison Blues" gave Johnny Cash his first top-10 country
hit in 1956, and his live concert performance at
Folsom_dramatized memorably in the film Walk The Line_gave his
flagging career a critical jump-start in 1968. But the prison
with which Johnny Cash was most closely associated wasn't Folsom,
it was San Quentin, a maximum-security penitentiary just outside
of San Francisco. San Quentin is where Cash played his first-ever
prison concert on January 1, 1958_a concert that helped set Merle
Haggard, then a 20-year-old San Quentin inmate, on the path
toward becoming a country music legend.
Haggard was a product of Bakersfield, California, a hard-bitten
Central Valley town that was the final stop for tens of thousands
of poor, white farmers and laborers who migrated west during the
1930s, 40s and 50s seeking work in the factories, farm fields and
oilfields of California. These Oklahomans, Texans and others
referred to by the blanket term "Okies" brought with them a love
of country music, and not just any country music, but "Loud music
that plays until all hours," as Wynn Stewart sang in his 1962
country hit "How the Other Half Lives." Merle Haggard would
eventually become an architect of the hard-driving, no-frills
Bakersfield Sound, which shook the Nashville establishment in the
1960s. But not before he ran afoul of the legal establishment in
ways that most country singers only sing about.
Haggard did his first stint in jail at age 11, when his mother
turned him over to the juvenile authorities as "incorrigible." As
a teenager, Haggard went into jail at least three more times, and
went out via escape at least once. In 1957, at the age of 18,
Haggard was arrested on a burglary charge and sentenced to 15
years in San Quentin. He ended up serving only two years of that
sentence, though, and he credits Cash with giving him the
inspiration to launch a career after prison that included 38 #1
hits on the country charts, including "Sing Me Back Home," "Okie
From Muskogee" and "Today I Started Loving You Again." Of Johnny
Cash's prison debut, Haggard said this: "He had the right
attitude. He chewed gum, looked arrogant and flipped the bird to
the guards_he did everything the prisoners wanted to do. He was a
mean mother from the South who was there because he loved us.
When he walked away, everyone in that place had become a Johnny
Cash fan."
73 - K.O., n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
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