Familiarity Breeds Content in Rich Merle Haggard Set

Merle Haggard sang a song at the Coach House that helped explain why he hasn’t gone postal on a Nashville establishment that showers all that glitters on the young and the feckless while he, one of the great singers and songwriters in country music history, plugs on at 61 without a recording contract.

“I live the kind of life most men don’t dream of / Make my living writing songs and singing them,” he sang in “Footlights,” a 1978 ballad--about carrying on for the love of the music--that resonates even more powerfully a decade after he charted his last Top 10 hit.

The song, in typical Haggard fashion, zeros in on what’s important and leaves self-pitying to others.

So, while he goes about making his living with yet another round of touring--Thursday night’s show launched a West Coast tour after a two-month hiatus for Haggard and his band, the Strangers--Haggard exhibited no signs of frustration. There was only the joy of being back on stage with a group of musicians who revel in playing together.

The big things rarely change anymore in Haggard’s shows. There’s always a slew of hits--the only question is which, and how many, of his 38 No. 1 country singles he’ll pull out--inspired support from the Strangers and the inimitable Haggard vocals that are nonetheless imitated by country newcomers every day.

It’s the little things that vary--the nuance he brings to each vocal or the song out of left field. But what a big part those little things play in making every Haggard performance extraordinary.

Without any new material--he didn’t preview anything from a gospel album he’s working on and ignored his 1990s albums--the 80-minute set was built on those gems from his imposing catalog. They were interspersed with numbers spotlighting other members of the Strangers and choice covers of songs by the artists who shaped Haggard’s music.

Fittingly, he opened with “Right or Wrong,” the 1936 western swing classic by Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, whose imprint looms as large as anyone’s on Haggard--especially the Playboys’ model of a gifted and versatile band that can start and stop on a dime, improvise brilliantly, then lock into tight ensemble sections.

Lead guitarist Red Volkhart peeled off one brilliant solo after another, employing a melodic and chordal inventiveness usually associated with jazz players.

As a vocalist, Haggard couldn’t go through the motions if someone drew him a diagram, which made even his most familiar songs live and breathe.

He seemed charged at each moment to seek out the best vocal turn or color with which to express each syllable, which invested “If I Could Only Fly,” a Blaze Folley song that Haggard and Willie Nelson recorded as a duet in 1987, with the kind of palpable emotion most singers only dream of.

If I could only fly

I’d bid this place goodbye

And come and be with you . . .

And I can hardly stand

I got nowhere to run

Another sinking sun

And one more lonely night

Perhaps Grammy voters who recently gave Shania Twain the Grammy for country song of the year for her Hallmark-ready hit “You’re Still the One”--a worthy message about long-term romantic commitment expressed in the most hackneyed terms--are too young to have heard “If I Could Only Fly” or much of Haggard’s repertoire. If they did, they’d know the infinite depth of feeling that’s possible within the bounds of a country song.

Contemporary country fans like to brag that today’s music is more upbeat, less depressing, than country of the past. But Haggard knows better. The joy he expresses in songs about love requited is possible only because he’s also known the abject pain that sets in when love withers.

Garth, Alan and the rest sing snappy ditties about nursing beers in the honky-tonk when they’re lonely, but they wink at pain. The Bard of Bakersfield embraces it in his 1966 classic “Swinging Doors”:

I got everything I need to drive me crazy

I got everything it takes to lose my mind

And in here the atmosphere’s just right for heartache

Thanks to you, I’m always here till closing time.

A boisterous, near capacity crowd turned the catchy chorus into a barroom sing-along.

“Looking in the bottom of a glass,” Haggard sang in his 1980 hit “Misery and Gin,” “all I see is a man who’s fading fast . . . I may look like I’m havin’ a good time / But this honky-tonk heaven / Makes me feel like hell.”

There’s a school of thought that says hell isn’t a place where you endure fire and brimstone, but where you sit forever just outside the gates of heaven. That’s the parcel of real estate Haggard’s music knows so well.

San Diego’s Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash got the evening off to an invigorating start. While lead singer-songwriter Mark Stuart is vocally closer to Waylon Jennings and, yes, Haggard, the quintet taps the renegade spirit of Cash and other pre- and post-World War II country giants. In “7 Steps,” a Latin-flavored Stuart original, the Sons came closest to exhibiting the kind of emotionally honest song craft that so obviously inspires them.