The singer Don Henley said had a voice “just like gold”
To this day, Los Angeles’ soft rock giants still Eagles stand tall in global record sales, Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) compilation and 1976’s Hotel California staying put as the fifth and sixth, respectively, biggest-selling albums of all time. While ‘The City of Angels’ has a long and storied musical tapestry, it’s probably Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s West Coast yacht country that will endure as the city’s definitive soundtrack.
Indeed, Eagles are so embedded in the music culture that LA’s Forum stadium stuck a giant record of Hotel California on its roof, revolving at 17 miles per hour.
Enjoying enormous commercial success in the 1980s as a solo star and riding the adult-contemporary and pop-rock waves of the day, Henley, at his heart, was a country boy, born in Texas and founding Eagles in 1971 as a firmer country rock outfit than the soft stylings that would define their work by the 1970s’ close.
Speaking to BBC Radio 2 in 2019, Henley gave an insight into the country stars he loved the most. Reeling off the likes of Buck Owens, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, and Emmylou Harris, Henley opted for a slightly lesser-known name for serious high praise.
“My absolute favourite country singer of all time is probably a gentleman named Merle Haggard,” Henley confessed. “[He] has a voice that is just like gold to me. It’s one of the greatest voices of all time, I think. Merle’s family originated, I believe, in Oklahoma; they were ‘Okies’ who went west, and Merle ended up out in California. He recorded many, many hits over the years, beginning way back in the 1960s, and he is someone that I only met a couple of years ago.”
A pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, Haggard’s road to country stardom was a fraught one. In and out of juvenile centres as a delinquent teen, a spell as an adult at the San Quentin Prison in 1958 resulted in attendance for Johnny Cash’s famed performance at the correctional facility. In addition to being haunted by the death row inmates he’d befriended, Haggard pursued the straight and narrow in life, leaving prison in 1960 to pursue music over crime.
Knowing the blue-collar life, Haggard was able to pen numbers that articulated the fringes of American life. Yet, his rustic lyricism was imbued with a conservative veneration for the ‘stars ‘n’ stripes’ and a cool distance from the day’s protests and civil unrest, adopting a traditionalism at odds with his peers in the country game from Cash, Nelson, and the politically minded Kris Kristofferson.
While the hippies around him were fighting ‘The Man’, Haggard received appreciative letters from the office of Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan pardoned him for his past crimes as a state governor in 1972.
“I’ve met him when he came to play in a little theatre in my hometown of Linden, Texas,” Henley recalled. “It was a real pleasure to meet him. He is quite a character, to say the least [laughs]. He is really something else”. Shortly before his death, Haggard guested on Henley’s ‘The Cost of Living’ from 2015’s Cass County, an experience the Eagle drummer and singer described as “nervous” but “happily surprised” when recording with his country hero.
