The crowd watches from the riverbank as Merle Haggard performs at the Riverbend Festival on Sunday, June 7, 2015.Country giant Merle Haggard, who celebrated outlaws, underdogs and an abiding sense of national pride in such hits as “Okie From Muskogee” and “Sing Me Back Home,” died Wednesday at 79, on his birthday.
Haggard’s manager, Frank Mull, said the country icon died in Palo Cedro, California, of pneumonia.
Haggard performed at Chattanooga’s Riverbend festival in 2015.
Since he began recording in the early ’60s, the Oklahoman-cum-Californian “poet of the common man” has cranked out songs with an efficiency that borders on superhuman at times. Of the 84 albums he’s released, 14 of them were produced in 1969 and 1971 alone.
More than 70 of the hundreds of songs he has recorded have reached the Top 10, including every single he recorded between 1966 and 1985. In all, he is responsible for more country chart-toppers than Dixie Chicks, Johnny Cash and Garth Brooks … combined.