Letters: Merle Haggard represented a better time

Merle Haggard is dead, and I don’t feel so good myself. There will never be another one like him, because he represented a time past. A child of grinding poverty, Okie immigrants escaping the dust bowl, he was raised in a converted railroad car by a hardworking carpenter father who could barely make ends meet, and a mother with hungry eyes. He suffered not because of some drug addiction of his parents, or because of their belief that hard work was futile, but because of the circumstances of their generation. But that generation, born with nothing, raised a generation who created a nation that has everything.

You don’t have to be an Okie or have worked in the oilpatch to appreciate Haggard’s lyrics. You just have to be human.

It’s impossible for me to understand the depth of some of Haggard’s mournful lyrics, but my father, born in South Carolina and raised in the Great Depression, with his eight-grade education and untreatable skin jungle rot from his World War II service in New Guinea, surely did. I never heard him moan or complain that the government did not do enough for him.

He worked until he could work no more and raised his five sons on the constant refrain that we could achieve anything if we were willing to work for it. He was not exceptional for his generation, and we all reap the benefits.

This story was originally published April 14, 2016 at 3:19 PM with the headline "Letters: Merle Haggard represented a better time."