Legendary country singer Merle Haggard dies

Merle Haggard, one of the icons of country music, died Wednesday, his 79th birthday, at his home in California.

Haggard recently had been suffering from pneumonia, an illness that had forced him to cancel several concerts over the past few months.

Born April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield, California, Haggard grew up in a family who fled the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Depression.

He first came in contact with country music when he was a teenager, a period during which he began having frequent problems with the law that, later, resulted in his serving several years in San Quentin prison.

His musical career began in the 1960s when, after comprising part of the Wynn Stewart band, he came out with “Strangers” in 1965, his first solo album and the first in a long, fertile and successful lifetime run of more than 70 albums.

Haggard was a pioneer of what became known as the “Bakersfield sound,” a current within country music that emerged in response to the more polished style associated with Nashville and which had a sharper focus with greater importance attached to electric instrumentation.

He was also greatly admired for his poetic ability to tell about the lives of the working class in his songs.

According to his profile in the Country Music Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 1994, Haggard recorded more than 600 songs in his career, of which 250 were written by himself alone, and he achieved 30 No. 1 hits.

Among his most popular numbers are “Okie From Muskogee,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” “Mama Tried” and “Workin’ Man Blues.”

Haggard, in addition, broadened his country style by combining it with jazz, swing, blues and folk.

His last album, “Django and Jimmie,” was released in 2015 with Willie Nelson.