Merle Haggard Was Put With The Death Row Inmates After He Got Caught Making Beer In Prison, & It Changed His Life Forever

An experience you would certainly remember forever.

A somewhat troubled childhood led to years spent behind bars for Merle Haggard, who was born in 1937 and spent his early childhood years in a converted railroad boxcar, which his father purchased from the Santa Fe Railroad in Oildale, California, where he was working at the time.

Merle’s father passed away when he was just 9-years-old, and it left him up to his own devices in many ways as his mother had to go back to work to support

At 13, he was stealing, shoplifting, and writing bad checks, which lead to a stint in a juvenile detention center, and eventually, as an adult, he found himself at San Quentin prison after he attempted to rob a roadhouse in Bakersfield. The famous story goes that it’s where he saw Johnny Cash play and it changed his life, and Merle was actually in the roughest wing of the notorious prison for a time.

In fact, he met two men who were on death-row which inspired his iconic song “Sing Me Back Home,” but eventually, seeing all of the horrors of prison led to him straightening up his act for good, allowing him to become the country legend he was destined to be, and when he did finally get out of San Quentin, he never again was arrested.

During a 1995 interview with NPR, Merle recalled how he ended up on the “death-row,” block of the prison saying he got caught making beer, drank too much of his own stuff, got drunk in the prison yard and then got arrested.

As he points out, it’s pretty tough to get “arrested in San Quentin,” and he wound up on the “shelf,” where all the death-row inmates where. He called in a “sobering experience,” saying he had nothing but a Bible and concrete slab… before he had even recovered from his hangover, he knew he was finished with the bad path he was on:

“Yeah. I was – I got caught for making beer (laughter). I was making some beer up there, and I got too much of my own beer and got drunk in the yard and got arrested. It’s hard to get arrested in San Quentin, but I did. And they sent me to what was known as the shelf.

And the shelf is part of the north block, which share – you share with the inmates on death row. And it’s kind of like the – there’s not too many more stops for you, actually, you know? And that was the, as you put it, sobering experience for me. I wound up with nothing to lay on except a Bible and an old concrete slab and woke up from that drunk that I’d been on that day.

And I could hear some prisoners talking in the area next to me. In other words, there was an alleyway between the back of the cells, and I could hear people talking over there, and I recognized the guy as being Caryl Chessman, the guy that they were fixing to execute. And I don’t know… it was just something about the whole situation that I knew that if I ever got out of there, if I was lucky enough to get out – I made up my mind while I still had that hangover – that I was all finished.”

Talk about being scared straight…

When he got back to his normal area of the prison, he went and asked for the roughest job there, and got put in the textile mill. Merle admits he started trying to build up a “long line of good things to be proud of” after that, and it was a lifelong journey thereafter:

“Well, I went back down on the yard and went down and asked for the roughest job in the penitentiary, which was a textile mill. And went down and just started building my reputation, you know?

Just started running in reverse from what I’d been doing and started trying to build up a long line of good things to be proud of. And that’s what I’ve been doing since then.”

Many country artists have been described with the title of being an “outlaw,” but truly no one lived it, learned from it, or wrote better, true songs about it than The Hag.

His story is inspiring, and who knew that all it would take for him to finally get his life together all those decades ago was getting too drunk on homemade beer and ending up on death-row… actually, it makes a lot of sense, but it sounds like a movie more than a story that was lived by one of country music’s most beloved legends.

“Sing Me Back Home”

The post Merle Haggard Was Put With The Death Row Inmates After He Got Caught Making Beer In Prison, & It Changed His Life Forever first appeared on Whiskey Riff.