Country music legend Merle Ronald Haggard has passed away today, coinciding with his 79th birthday.
Merle’s main musical focus was vocals, guitar, and the fiddle, but he was also a multi-instrumentalist who helped forge the “Bakersfield Sound” (a genre of country stemming from Bakersfield, California), along with Buck Owens and the Strangers beginning in the 1960’s. He continued a long career writing such hits as “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Okie From Muskogee,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” “Mama Tried” and “Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver).”
Haggard died from complications with pneumonia in his home in Northern California.
Video of the man himself performing “The Bottle Let Me Down” in 1968, off his 1965 album entitled Swinging Doors.