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I think my brand of country music is that's been influenced by not just the rough-stock rodeo side or Ted Nugent's "let's get crazy style", but also the stand-up and sing style's like George Strait and Merle Haggard, and also the wild side of Chris Ledoux
Oct 1, 2025
The Bowery was a place that would let us do original songs - not just covers - but we would have to work for tips, so we learned how to work an audience. In order to keep our jobs, we had to keep people happy, so that meant playing the latest Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top or Merle Haggard.
I don't want to lose you.' His voice almost a whisper. Seeing his haggard expression, she took his hand and squeezed it, then reluctantly let it go. She could feel the tears again, and she fought them back. 'But you don't want to keep me, either, do you?' To that, he had no response.
It's cool when your husband starts to sing some old Merle Haggard song and I can pop in with a harmony and it doesn't sound too bad.
I can't be gay! I'm a happily married conservative, just like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig.
If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination
And I think it's safe to say that the single very impressive figure to me was Merle Haggard.
Laughter is very young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.
I really like Alan Jackson, in Country Music. I think he's really very, very talented along with George Jones, and Merle Haggard, the same old favorites.
Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.
New Rule: There is no devil, so stop blaming your screw-ups on him. Last week, one of the biggest evangelical leaders in America, the Reverend Ted Haggard, was outed for drugs and extramarital gay sex with a male prostitute. Or as Fox News reported it, 'John Kerry hates our troops'.
Reverend Ted Haggard's followers still think he's not gay. I'm not kidding. In their world, there are no gay people. There are just straight people who are sinning. They don't want to do it, but the Devil makes them! He targets people like Reverend Ted. That's how it happened. The Devil got hold of Reverend Ted, and Ted said, 'Get thee behind me, Satan! And put it in, gently'.
She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.
He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.
Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly.
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit: He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practise As full of labour as a wise man's art For folly that he wisely shows is fit; But wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit.
Whene'er with haggard eyes I view This dungeon that I'm rotting in, I think of those companions true Who studied with me at the U- Niversity of Gottingen.
The haggard aspect of the little old man was wonderfully suited to the place; he might have groped among old churches and tombs and deserted houses and gathered all the spoils with his own hands. There was nothing in the whole collection but was in keeping with himself nothing that looked older or more worn than he.
If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils. Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
Old and sick, more than one hundred years Face haggard, hair white, I'm happy to still live in the mountains A cloth covered phantom watching the years flow by Why envy people with clever ways of living?
I had always loved music. I grew up listening to classic country, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. My dad loved Vern Gosdin and Keith Whitley. So I kept going to class and started getting totally into playing guitar and teaching myself these songs.
She is not old, she is not young, The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue. The haggard cheek, the hungering eye, The poisoned words that wildly fly, The famished face, the fevered hand, Who slights the worthiest in the land, Sneers at the just, contemns the brave, And blackens goodness in its grave.
O jealousy, Thou ugliest fiend of hell! thy deadly venom Preys on my vitals, turns the healthful hue Of my flesh check to haggard sallowness, And drinks my spirit up!
May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.
8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.
Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts.
In the end, oh I know, never, in my haggard passion, have I ever been such a cadaver as now as I take again in hand my tables of the present— if reality's real, but after it's been destroyed in the eternal and the moment by the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness.
In time the savage bull sustains the yoke; In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure; In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak, In time the flint is pierced with softest shower, And she in time will fall from her disdain, And rue the sufferance of your friendly pain.
I just got into it like a lot of people through the rock 'n' roll bands in the late '60s that turned to country music, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but particularly through The Byrds because of Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman (with their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo). They kind of introduced English kids to Merle Haggard and George Jones and the Louvins (brothers Charlie and Ira).
You know, legends are people like Haggard and Jones and Wills and Sinatra. Those people are legends. I'm just a young buck out here trying to keep in that same circle with the rest of 'em.
My music comes from country music. Merle Haggard is God, and I do believe that. I'm not too tuned in to country music. I don't know who Brooks and Dunn are. I like Shania Twain, though!
Around 14, I was turned on to Shania, Reba, Merle Haggard, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood... and I've followed it ever since.
I've had mentors who were kind of the troubadour singer-songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and that's just what I've always liked - people who would talk real honestly about their lives and their circumstance.
I was mainly influenced by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and others like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash.
Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams. All of them are different styles, but those are the songs that make the times. They're the songs that last through time.
The truth is that trout fishermen scheme and lie and toss in their sleep. They dream of great dripping trout, shapely and elusive as mermaids, and arise cranky and haggard from their fantasies. They are moody and neglectful and all of them a little daft. Moreover they are inclined to drink too much.
Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more.
God bless Merle Haggard. He did all the things that Johnny Cash was supposed to have done.
I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore.
In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well.
There's just enough drinking and cheating songs around without me adding to them. Unless you've got something better than "Misery and Gin" by Merle Haggard, you're beating a dead horse.
It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge.
Haggard, I would not be you for all the world," he declared. "You have let your doom in by the front door, although it will not depart that way. (...) Farewell, poor Haggard, farewell!
A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?
But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging. ... Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio, too. ... And I think it's safe to say that the single very impressive figure to me was Merle Haggard. ... Dylan can do no wrong. ... Glenn Gould was my hero. Glenn Gould was my idol. I loved him. ... I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.
[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.
I try to write like the writers I admire - I rip them off in form. It comes from George Strait and Merle Haggard records, and country music in general is really good at that, the twisted phrase... So Im always looking for that angle in my own work.
I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am.
Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.
In 1992 I was doing one of my first ever tours and I was in Heathrow airport and I saw these middle-aged musicians who had clearly been on tour for decades, and they all looked haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I vowed to myself that I would never be that person. Flash forward 20 years and I found myself in Heathrow looking haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I decided I would rather spend my time staying home working on music and making dinner with friends, instead of spending six months in a hotel in a state of depressing suspended adolescence.