The country singer Tom Waits said most others couldn’t match: “The greatest voices of all time”
When Tom Waits was a teen, studying songs “like they were books”, he didn’t believe anything good could come out of National City.
Back then, despite his love for musical art, he felt that being ordinary wasn’t a precursor to greatness. He also believed that hardly any normal folk ended up with their names in lights, always the listener, the quiet observer, and never the one actually up there, changing the world from the stage.
This perspective changed when he started listening to those whose voices came from the hardships of working-class communities, and it mostly changed when he started viewing Merle Haggard as the ultimate muse, someone who could, as he once said, “take the lives of common ordinary folks who we had all stopped seeing and put them in songs and gave them a voice, and kept them alive”.
Haggard passed away in 2016, a tragedy that forced other country and rock legends like Waits to regard his legacy under a new light. He was a guiding force for Waits for a significant portion of his life and career, and when he died, Waits didn’t just reflect on how his songs were “filled with longing” and how his last name “will always be an adjective”, he listed all the reasons why he was above every other country voice, with songs like ‘Sing Me Back Home’, ‘I’m a Lonesome Fugitive’, ‘Mama Tried’ and ‘The Fighting Side of Me’ all proving why he was the connoisseur of pouring hardships into musical gold.
He also described his music as “train-like”: lonely but always moving. One of Waits’ first-ever country songs, ‘Blind Love’, is a subtle love-letter to Haggard’s lovelorn musings on loss and loneliness, a subscription to that “roadhouse feel” that he always loved in Haggard’s music. It’s also the reason why no one else ever came close. As Waits once explained, “I like Merle Haggard. Most of those other guys, though, sound like they’re all just drinking tea and watching their waist and talking to their accountant.”
Although Haggard emerged as part of the outlaw country movement with names like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, many saw him as the pinnacle of all it symbolised, along with the natural mystery at its core that gave its forerunners an edge you couldn’t find over in Nashville. For people like Waits, it was his voice that carried all the weight, enough to carry the multitude of human existence before you’ve even looked further into the lyrics.
This was something that countless others in the country rock genre sought to replicate. Don Henley saw his voice as the blueprint and carried it through some of the Eagles’ biggest tunes, as he once told BBC Radio 2, “My absolute favourite country singer of all time is probably a gentleman named Merle Haggard. He has a voice that is just like gold to me. It’s one of the greatest voices of all time, I think.”
For bands like the Eagles, the icon was also a good source for concept exploration, even in the simpler means of looking at loss from a singular point of view. A song like ‘Mama Tried’, for instance, teaches the fluidity of extracting personal experiences and adding in embellishments for storytelling purposes. Haggard was always forthcoming in his own narration, but he also changed the game when it came to fictional sprinklings, moulding the entire genre into something far more engaging.
