Merle Haggard Birthplace — Oildale, California

Merle Ronald Haggard was born on April 6, 1937, in a converted boxcar in Oildale, California — a working-class community on the north edge of Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley — to Okies who had fled the Dust Bowl from Checotah, Oklahoma, in the 1930s. His origins were about as hard as origins get: a father who died when Merle was nine, an adolescence of petty crime and reform schools, and an eventual conviction for burglary that sent him to San Quentin State Prison. He saw Johnny Cash perform at San Quentin in 1958 and later claimed the concert changed his life. He was paroled in 1960 and began playing Bakersfield's beer joint circuit.

Haggard became the pre-eminent voice of working-class America in country music — a songwriter of fierce emotional precision and an interpreter of extraordinary depth. "Mama Tried," "Sing Me Back Home," "Hungry Eyes," "Okie from Muskogee," "The Fightin' Side of Me," "If We Make It Through December" — his catalogue was vast, consistent, and rooted in the specifics of lives lived on the margin. His Bakersfield Sound — rawer and more electric than the Nashville Sound of the same era — influenced generations of country and rock musicians, from Gram Parsons to Elvis Costello.

Oildale and Bakersfield celebrate Haggard as their most significant musical export. A historical marker near his birthplace site acknowledges his origins. He died on April 6, 2016 — his 79th birthday — at his ranch in Palo Cedro, California, from pneumonia. Buck Owens, his fellow Bakersfield Sound pioneer, is buried nearby, and the region's claim on country music history is substantial and underappreciated.