POP MUSIC : This Guy Sounds Just Like MERLE HAGGARD : Why deal with a legion of Merle wanna-bes, when you can talk to the real McCoy?

Are great country singers born or made?

Merle Haggard, widely regarded as the most influential vocalist in modern country music, stares straight ahead as he ponders the question.

Though the bearded singer has been a star in country music for almost 30 years, he remains a notoriously private man whose eyes can be as noncommittal as a poker player’s during a high-stakes game. He seems to enjoy keeping those around him in suspense.

“ Made ,” Haggard finally offers with a certainty that suggests there was really no doubt in his mind. But there’s also a twinkle of delight in his eyes, as if he figures his answer caught a reporter off-guard.

After all, Haggard’s voice is a rich, deep God-given baritone so prized by country music record executives and radio programmers that almost all the key male singers to reach the charts in the last 10 years echo Haggard’s style: George Strait and Randy Travis to Garth Brooks and Clint Black to Mark Chesnutt and Alan Jackson.

“People talk about singers being born,” he explains. “But if that were true, you’d have more great singers’ kids turning out to be great singers.

“There may be something in the genes that gives you a particular voice, but you have to know what to do with it in order to be something special.”

To anyone familiar with Haggard’s colorful history, the suggestion of “knowing what to do with” the voice may seem a stiff challenge. They may assume a singer would have to walk the troubled path he did in order to develop his vocal character and phrasing.

Haggard not only possesses the quintessential voice in modern country music, but he has also lived most of the themes--from poverty and prison to heartache and wanderlust--that are staples of honky-tonk jukeboxes.

The son of a Dust Bowl migrant, the Bakersfield native was just 9 when his father died and, not wanting to be a burden on his mother, he spent much of his teen-age years on the run. He hitchhiked, hopped freight trains, worked in fruit orchards and oil fields, and he got into enough petty crime to end up in San Quentin state prison for three years.

But Haggard’s not talking about riding the rails or serving time when he talks about the influences on his vocal style. His flamboyant history certainly gave him material for songs, but other factors played a more important part in his shaping his singing.

“The first thing is you’ve got to have this overpowering desire to sing,” he said, defining his own development. “That usually means hearing someone else who excites you so much that you can’t think of doing anything else.

“But you’ve got to be excited by the singing, not the stardom or the money. You’ve got to be excited enough so that you make singing a science . . . so that you become a historian of other singers.

“The idea isn’t to imitate someone else, but to study and learn from them so that you can see what is possible. Then, you have to move past your heroes to find your own voice--and that is often the hardest part.

“Your voice’s deep inside you somewhere, but some people get satisfied with a little success and then give up before they reach deep enough. That’s the real challenge: You just keep reaching down.”

Haggard paused, as if looking for a way to simplify his remarks.

Finally, he simply repeated what he tells the countless young hopefuls who ask him what it takes to be a great singer.

Absolutely dead-pan, he said, “I tell them, ‘You need to have started when you were about 6.”

Haggard hasn’t enjoyed the pop success of such other great country artists as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, but his success within country music has been phenomenal.

By the end of the ‘80s, he had registered more than three dozen No. 1 country singles, including nine in a row at one point in the mid-’70s. He is the fourth most successful artist in the history of the Billboard magazine singles sales charts, behind only Eddy Arnold, George Jones and Cash.

Haggard’s popularity hasn’t been based solely on his singing. He is also considered one of the premier songwriters in country music--he’s written more than 300 songs, from the social commentary of “Okie From Muskogee” to the social realism of “Hungry Eyes” to the tenderness of “If We Make It Through December” to the honky-tonk spunk of “Swinging Doors.”

But it is his singing that has brought him the most acclaim, including an Award of Merit last month at the American Music Awards ceremony in Los Angeles--an award previously bestowed on such pop giants as Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald.

“Practically no one is better than Haggard at capturing in metaphor the bleary-eyed Angst and dark revelations of the soul that lie beyond the second six-pack,” critic Bob Allen once wrote in Esquire magazine.

“But really, it’s that husky voice of his, with its gnawing sense of despair, with its emotive mid-range strength that can soar so easily into a shining blues yodel or descend so dizzily into a growing basso profundo, that gives his original material its cutting edge.”

Despite his great impact on country music, there has been little documentation of Haggard’s musical development. There have been de rigueur references in stories to his early love of Lefty Frizzell and Bob Wills, but most accounts of his progression dwell on such incidents as the night in 1957 that he and some pals were so drunk that they didn’t realize the cafe they were trying to break into was still open. He wound up in San Quentin for nearly three years for second-degree burglary and escape. He was subsequently pardoned by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Sitting in a West Hollywood hotel the day after the American Music Awards telecast, Haggard, 53, said music was part of his life for as long as he can remember.

“From what I understand, I showed signs of being interested or inclined towards music very early,” he said, puffing on a cigarette.

“I have a new daughter who is 13 months old and she has that same thing. There can be any kind of music that comes on television or the radio and it just engulfs her completely.”

Haggard, who now lives on a 500-acre ranch near Redding, found it easy as a youngster to impersonate singers he heard on the radio and he thinks the attention it brought him was one thing that made him keep at it.

“Public reaction when I growing up was important, and I’m talking about long before I was singing on stage,” he said. “It was a big deal to be accepted by kids four or five years older than yourself, and that happened to me. I ran around with kids 21 when I was 14 because I could play the guitar.”

Given the Oklahoma Dust Bowl background of his parents, you’d think country music would have been the dominant style of music around the Haggard house in Bakersfield--that, in essence, Haggard was raised on country. But the stereotype isn’t true.

In fact, Haggard’s mother tried to down play their “Okie” roots.

“Dad was proud of being an Okie,” Haggard said. “That’s where ‘Okie From Muskogee’ came from. He was the guy in the song. But my mother and sister would have liked to have been as high up the ladder of society as they could.

“They didn’t want anything to do with country music or being an Okie, until I started to do something in music and then they became very proud. But in the early years, they would play records of the Andrew Sisters and Bing Crosby . . . the pop artists of the day.”

But young Haggard responded more to the music of Bob Wills on the radio. Wills, who helped popularize Western swing, was a fiddle-playing bandleader whose lively music also incorporated elements of jazz and blues.

“His music was exciting, way ahead of his time,” Haggard recalled. “I didn’t understand the distinction between pop and country at the time because it all came across the same radio.

“But I now realize the stuff they called pop music wasn’t as much fun to listen to. It seemed too stiff, too (regimented). Wills’ music was more exciting. It had a beat, vitality, freedom.”

So Tommy Duncan, the vocalist with the band, became one of Haggard’s first heroes.

But the real breakthrough was hearing Hank Williams’ chief rival. At the time Haggard first heard Lefty Frizzell around 1950, Frizzell was still in his early 20s but already had a string of hits, including “If You’ve Got the Money Honey, I’ve Got the Time” and “I Love You a Thousand Ways.”

Frizzell sang with a distinctive, rolling, slurred style--a wholly personal, unpredictable approach that combined the energy of the blues and the sensual grace of what would later be called soul music.

“Hearing Lefty’s voice was a turning point in my life,” Haggard said, wistfully. “If Lefty had met Col. Tom Parker back then, there probably would never had been an Elvis.

“Presley had definitely seen Lefty Frizzell by the time he went to Sun Records and met Col. Parker. The sideburns, the overall look, the nervous energy on stage--Lefty had all that too.

“And to my mind, he had a greater voice than Elvis. Hank Snow used to say, you could pick Lefty’s voice out of a thousand voices and it was true. He delivered every line in a song like Henry Fonda . . . absolutely believable. He was like a great actor. You listen to his songs and there isn’t one line anywhere that makes you feel the guy didn’t mean what he was singing. Every breath was authentic.”

Frizzell became Haggard’s main model.

He studied Frizzell’s recordings (10 of which are now on available in Columbia Records’ “American Originals” CD series) and checked out Frizzell’s influences--including Jimmie Rodgers, the blues-influenced country singer from the ‘20s and ‘30s who was the first person elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961.

As Haggard became more serious about a singing career in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, however, he also examined the style of almost anyone else who caught his attention, from fellow Bakersfield artists Buck Owens and Wynn Stewart to Elvis Presley, Marty Robbins, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles.

In the early days of his career, Haggard said, he’d try to picture how these other singers might handle a certain phrase or emotion in one of his own songs, and he’d sometimes model a line with them in mind.

It took him a few years, he said, to completely find his own voice, both as a singer and a writer.

“If you go back and listen to ‘Swinging Doors,’ (in 1966) you can see I was doing a combination of Wynn Stewart and Buck Owens because that’s how I pictured the song,” he said.

“You could still hear pieces of other singers in certain lines in things like ‘Branded Man,’ but I was pretty much doing my own thing by the time of ‘Hungry Eyes’ (in 1969). By then, I knew how to find everything I needed for a song in myself.”

Haggard’s writing progressed along similar lines.

“Swinging Doors”--his first Top 10 hit on Capitol Records-- was a quintessential honky-tonk song.

Sample lines:

I’ve got swinging doors, a jukebox and a bar stool

And my new home has a flashing neon sign

Stop by and see me any time you want to,

‘Cause I’m always here at home till closing time.

He wrote the song, he said, because he was singing mostly in honky-tonks at the time and he knew his audience would respond to it.

“In the beginning, I was trying to write myself a hit, so I aimed it right at the people I was singing to,” Haggard said. “I did it in threes for a while. After ‘Swinging Doors’ hit, it was easy to come up with ‘The Bottle Let Me Down’ and ‘I Threw Away the Rose.’

“But then I decided it was time to get off of that and I went to prison songs. It started because I heard ‘The Fugitive’ by Liz Anderson and I knew it would be a No. 1 song, and I thought I’d write a couple more about prison. That led to ‘Branded Man’ and ‘Sing Me Back Home.’

“That was the beginning of me writing about me. I just kinda accidentally stumbled into it. The next thing I thought of was the human side of my mother’s life . . . all the problems she had and how she also had to nursemaid me, who was always getting into trouble. That led to ‘Mama Tried’ and then ‘Hungry Eyes.’ ”

Sample line from “Mama Tried”:

One and only rebel child,

from a family meek and mild,

My Mama seemed to know what

lay in store,

‘Spite of all my Sunday learnin’

towards the bad I kept on turnin’

‘Til Mama couldn’t hold me any more.

But it was “Hungry Eyes”--about his mother’s hard times after his father’s death--that remains one of Haggard’s personal favorites.

“That song was maybe too personal,” he said, softly. “It was a real spine-tingler to me, but I can hardly sing it sometimes because it brings back such memories.”

Sample lyrics:

He dreamed of something better

And my mama’s faith was strong

But us kids were just too young to realize

That another class of people put us somewhere just below

One more reason for my mama’s hungry eyes.

“Okie From Muskogee,” written the same year as “Hungry Eyes,” is probably the song for which Haggard is best known by pop audiences:

We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee

We don’t take our trips on LSD

We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street

‘Cause we like living right and being free.

Haggard has sometimes downplayed the seriousness of the song, perhaps not wishing to alienate his potential pop audience. But he now is clear about his feelings when he wrote the song.

“That was my political feeling at the time,” he said, pointedly. “I was (angry at) at the hippies . . . those guys trying to look like girls and putting down the serviceman. I came from a family of Marines. I just didn’t like it.”

Haggard has written and/or recorded more than 60 Top 10 hits since then, including “If We Make It Through December,” his biggest pop hit, and become a bigger star in country music than his own heroes. Young country singers now talk about him the way he speaks about Frizzell.

Haggard, who now records for Curb Records, smiles at the mention of his status in country music today.

“Sure, it’s flattering, but it also makes it tough on me to come up with something that they aren’t walking on,” he said. “It’s very competitive out there, especially when so many records sound just like something you are doing.

“There are a lot of real good new singers out there. I was really impressed with Travis Tritt on the awards show last night. . . . But most of them are just starting . . . only been making records three or four years and they’ve got to keep searching for that inner voice.

“The goal isn’t to be another Merle Haggard--because they can never be that. You can’t lean too heavily on anyone’s style. I didn’t like everything Jimmie Rodgers did. I just took out the part I liked. The same with Tommy and Lefty. They can only learn so much listening to me. The rest has to come from them. The competition is always with yourself.”