NEW YORK (AP) — Here's a sample of reaction to the death of country music star Merle Haggard. "He was my brother, my friend. I will miss him." – Willie Nelson. "The greatest singer-songwriter of my ...

Alan Jackson has great memories of one of his own musical heroes, Merle Haggard — but as he reveals in a new interview, the country legend was not too fond of one of Jackson's favorite down-home ...

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 ...

Fifty-three years ago today, on May 22, 1970, Merle Haggard landed at the top of the charts. It was on that date that Okie From Muskogee, the live album that Haggard released in December of 1969, hit ...

A photo of Merle Haggard from the commemorative plaque outside the Haggard House at the Kern County Museum. (Rebekah Kearn/Courthouse News) BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) — When I read that the late country ...

Author Marc Eliot knew the subject of his latest released biography, "The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard," for 25 years before his death in 2016. The writer's exposure to music, ...

Country music fans across the country are remembering Merle Haggard this week, with Thursday marking both the one-year anniversary of his passing and what would have been his 80th birthday. In Redding ...

Imagine arranging Merle Haggard‘s millions of fans in concentric circles. In the outermost ring, place the casual listeners, the ones familiar with “Mama Tried,” some of the canonical 1960s material ...

Merle Haggard, the working man’s poet, an architect of the Bakersfield Sound and a fiercely independent artist who influenced country music like few others, died Wednesday in California, surrounded by ...