This train stops at San Quentin, Grand Old Opry, & The White House

And you thought rap music was the genre where bad-ass credibility is essential for an artist. Not necessarily...

Pickin’ on Hag: Four can’t lose selections from Merle’s catalog Mama Tried (1968) If the argument is made that Haggard was always strongest at making singles or concept records, Mama Tried is the album that stands as the perfect counterpoint. The title track is flawless as are the bittersweet version of Dolly Parton’s “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” or the ambling beauty of “The Sunny Side of My Life.” Same Train, Different Time: A Tribute to Jimmie Rodgers (1969) His father was a railroad man and he rode the rails as a runaway teen, so it’s little surprise that Haggard drew his own inspiration from the music of the Singing Brakeman. In paying homage to Rodgers, Hag managed to draw out the timelessness in the songs and refine his own methods in making music. If Only I Could Fly (2000) Considered his great return, the first of his pair of albums for the Anti/Epitaph label finds Haggard recording mostly originals in a stripped-down setting that eschews the over-produced sound of the day (much as his Bakersfield sound had decades earlier), resulting in a collection that reaches aching and autumnal perfection. It’s hard not to flinch listening to the unwavering rawness and honesty in the lyrics and delivery of a song like “Wishing All These Old Things Were New.” More proof of the man’s mastery. Last of the Breed with Willie Nelson and Ray Price (2007) With two well-tipped Texas friends, Haggard made this double platter of real-deal country and Western. The trio runs through some favored nuggets spanning 80 years of the music’s history with guests like Kris Kristofferson, Elvis’ lads the Jordanaires, and incomparable Nashville saxman Boots Randolph.

Swap the doo-rags, Timberlands and tales of streetwise crimes and drug-dealing with Stetsons, Western boots, and stories of booze and shooting a man just to see him die.

The ones who have tried longest and hardest to be the real OGs were the country music singers.

The history of country and Western in America is a landscape littered with more than its share of outlaw figures. For the most part, these would-be system-bucking bad boys were more myth than anything else.

Willie Nelson never went to juvenile detention. Waylon Jennings never committed armed robbery. Johnny Cash never did hard time. All of them, however, were friends with someone who did all of that.

In a famous story from country music lore, the first time Merle Haggard met Johnny Cash he told the Man in Black how seeing him play a New Year’s Day concert in 1958 inside the walls of San Quentin prison left him a changed man. Cash admitted he didn’t recall Haggard being on the bill. Haggard replied, “I wasn’t in the show, I was in the audience.”

Indeed. Not only is he a country music icon, but Merle Haggard is one of the few who can claim a genuine criminal past. Unlike his peers, when he told stories about being a branded man or lonesome fugitive, he could actually relate.

The outlaw side is a good place to start, but judging the long shadow of Haggard’s mighty career by the light of his youthful misdeeds is silly.

With a rich baritone, the pen of a plain-spoken poet, and a hot band called the Strangers, he could lead a mob to tear up a barroom one minute and leave them with tears in their beers the next.

Merle Haggard has influenced virtually every country artist and provided inspiration for the Grateful Dead, Gram Parsons, the Rolling Stones and even Bob Dylan, with whom Haggard toured with the last few years.

Born in 1937 to Oklahoma Dust Bowl escapees in Northern California, Haggard—along with fellow great Buck Owens—crafted a unique, localized brand of country called “Bakersfield sound” in the 1960s, exemplified by twangy Fender guitars, big beats, and a honky-tonk raucousness missing from Nashville’s relatively clean and slick, string-laden records of the day.

His string of #1 country chart hits started in the in the mid 1960s and stretched for 30 years. Along the way he wrote and recorded more than his fair share of standards, like the regretful lament of “Mama Tried,” the hers and his outlaw classic “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde” with frequent duet partner and former wife Bonnie Owens, and the tongue-in-cheek, hippie-hating, “anti-protest” protest song “Okie From Muskogee.”

The past decade has been particularly fruitful. Haggard released a pair of exceptional albums on the Anti/Epitaph imprint, including the recent Last of the Breed with old running buddies and fellow legends Willie Nelson and Ray Price.

At 71 years old he has slowed little. Following the recently issued Bluegrass Sessions album, he is out touring, including a local stop this coming week at America’s Fair. And Haggard is once again proving he’s a working-class firebrand.

Unlike the pervading “blue collar = Republican red” mentality that has swept through country music’s ranks, Haggard—who received a pardon for all past crimes in 1972 from then-California governor Ronald Reagan and visited the Nixon White House—was out in late 2007 stumping for Hillary Clinton, even writing a song for her that included the line “Let’s get out of Iraq/And get back on track.”

Next time Toby Keith is up on stage trying hollowly to play like he’s part renegade malefactor and part proud American, someone needs to remind him of something: He’s not Merle Haggard and he never will be.

Merle Haggard performs at America’s Fair in Hamburg on Thursday, August 14.