The country music icon Don Henley called his hero: “He had a big influence”
The Eagles were never that far away from country music. Though the band always wanted to be a hybrid of all different flavours of American music, it’s not hard to see why they had so much of an influence among future country legends, down to the fact that superstar Vince Gill is now on the road with them as a touring member. It’s not like the band weren’t proud of their country roots, though, given that Don Henley claimed to get many of his chops through listening to Merle Haggard.
Coming out of Texas, Henley already had pieces of roots music built into his psyche before hearing of rock and roll. He may have seen Elvis Presley performing his vocal debut on the radio for the first time, but there was as much of Chuck Berry around the house as there were artists like George Jones and Buck Owens.
Compared to the rest of the country legends, Haggard always had a bit of a darker edge to him. Much like Johnny Cash, a lot of the songs that Haggard played went along with the outlaw mentality that a lot of those musicians carried around with them, almost like they were a band of musical fugitives running from the law.
Take a song like ‘Mama Tried’, for instance. There have been plenty of country songs about the importance of family and wanting to stand by your loved ones, but hearing Haggard singing about his checkered past and saying that his mother did everything she could to raise him right wouldn’t feel that out of place in a rock context, with the outlaw in question carrying a guitar on his hip instead of a pistol.
Since Haggard originated from Bakersfield, California, that gave Henley another incentive to move out West from Texas, telling The Montreal Gazette, “I would still listen to that music in California. I mean, Merle Haggard, may he rest in peace, has always been one of my musical heroes, and he lived in California — he was part of what was called the Bakersfield sound. You know, Merle and Buck Owens and some of that gang were recording out in Bakersfield, California. And those people had a big influence on the country-rock movement.”
It’s not hard to see how that country-rock genre started once you take a step back from the scene. Haggard wasn’t trying to be anything other than a country singer, but when artists like Gram Parsons started introducing that sound to Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, they suddenly had a different Americana flavour to incorporate into their sound.
Even when Henley started to take flight with the Eagles, a lot of that cowboy mentality seeped its way into their early records. Regardless of how well it did on the charts, no one can look at a record like Desperado and not see the pieces of Haggard’s best songs baked into its DNA from the moment it starts.
While there is usually an unspoken rule regarding whether country and rock could play nice together in the 1970s, Henley was out to prove that there was never that much of a difference between them in the first place. Rock had a little more attitude in its delivery, but when you hit on a timeless country melody, any track becomes bulletproof.
