{"id":190211,"date":"2025-08-31T23:07:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T23:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/190211\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T23:07:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T23:07:13","slug":"ethan-hawke-explores-merle-haggards-greatness-in-highway-99-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/190211\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke Explores Merle Haggard’s Greatness In ‘Highway 99’ Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMerle Haggard<\/a> was an escape artist.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe future country music legend broke out of juvenile hall and prison 17 times by his own count as a teenager and young man. But his greatest escape was getting out of Oildale, the hardscrabble town in California where he grew up, the son of refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOildale is and has been struggling with real poverty, abject poverty. I mean, a lot of the roads aren\u2019t paved,\u201d observes Ethan Hawke<\/a>, director of the Merle Haggard documentary Highway 99: A Double Album<\/a>, which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of homeless, a lot of addiction. And you start to see that this guy pulled himself out of there without any help. He\u2019s incarcerated from 14 to 23, grew up with virtually no education. I\u2019m not talking about a college education; I\u2019m talking about no education and rises to the pinnacle of a profession and that kind of writer. It\u2019s a staggering accomplishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTwo main factors motivated the Highway 99 project. One was Hawke\u2019s conviction that Merle Haggard\u2019s greatness and significance were being lost, obscured almost like the Oklahoma landscape in those dust storms of the 1930s.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"American<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMerle Haggard, circa 1970.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt did seem people had kind of forgotten about him,\u201d Hawke notes. \u201c\u2019Mama Tried\u2019 gets played by every cover band and stuff like that. And \u2018Okie From Muskogee\u2019 is the thing most people know about him. People forget that for a couple decades he was called the Poet of the Common Man, or the Voice of the Silent Majority, or all the different labels that got put on him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filmmaker adds, \u201cWhen he died, I know Willie Nelson sent out a group email to all his musician friends reminding people that one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived just passed and that he had more hits than Willie [Nelson], Johnny [Cash], and Dolly [Parton] combined. And just how rare it is that somebody could pick and sing and write like Merle Haggard could. Willie said, \u2018Usually God is more democratic than that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother motivation behind the film \u2014 Hawke\u2019s insight that Haggard speaks so clearly to the America of today, mired as it is in political polarization and antagonism. At one time or another, opposing camps tried to claim Haggard as their tribune.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI felt a couple years ago with the election looming that no matter what happened in the election, half of America was going to be despondent with the outcome and that it might be a great time to visit Merle Haggard\u2026He wasn\u2019t left or right,\u201d Hawke asserts. \u201cHe was really a humanist and talked about human feelings. And I think it kind of gives a meeting ground for people that I thought it could be a good moment to look at him no matter what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Merle<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMerle Haggard, 1969<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tAt one level Haggard never did escape Oildale, nor did he want to: he always closely identified with the working man and with those looked down upon by society. That spirit prompted him to write in defense of Okies in \u201cOkie From Muskogee\u201d \u2013 people disrespected by sophisticates. But Haggard also wrote \u201cThe Immigrant\u201d in 1978, a song recognizing the work of Mexican laborers coming to this country undocumented. He sang, \u201cBorder patroller, don\u2019t stop a stroller\/\u2019Cause the Mexican immigrant is helping America grow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1972, Haggard released \u201cIrma Jackson,\u201d a song that poignantly describes an interracial romance sabotaged by prejudice. As the film explores, he had written the song several years earlier, but Capitol Records wouldn\u2019t release it because the label thought it would damage Haggard\u2019s image. In 2003, Haggard spoke out against the invasion of Iraq and wrote the song \u201cAmerica First\u201d in opposition to the war and to Pres. Bush W. Bush (ironically, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance would use the tune as a campaign theme in 2024).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Merle<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMerle Haggard visiting the cell he lived in for almost three years at San Quentin Penitentiary in California.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps most remarkably of all, Haggard endorsed Hillary Clinton\u2019s bid for president in 2008 and wrote the song, \u201cLet\u2019s Put a Woman in Charge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAround the same time, he also wrote a song \u2014 it\u2019s not in the film \u2013 \u2018Only Me and Crippled Soldiers Give a Damn\u2019 about having respect for the flag. He didn\u2019t like it when people disrespect the flag,\u201d Hawke notes. \u201cOne [song] could be an obvious right-wing thing, but then the Hillary [song]\u2026 He\u2019s just telling his truth\u2026 That thing Jason Isbell says [in the film] that I think is so great is you can\u2019t hold up a mirror to one half of a person or a community. You have to actually look at what it is. And as soon as we start throwing people out, we\u2019ve broken the mirror. We\u2019re not looking at ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHawke organizes the film as a double album of Haggard songs, each one shedding light on the musician\u2019s biography.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Ethan<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tEthan Hawke speaks at the the 75th Berlin Film Festival Berlin on February 18, 2025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSebastian Reuter\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe wrote so much, and he wrote so personally that I had a huge canvas. Basically, what I tried to do is figure out his life story and kind of make sense of the narrative and then use his own words to tell it,\u201d he explains. \u201cYou want to talk about falling in love with Bonnie [Owens]? Okay, here\u2019s a song. Want to talk about divorce? Oh, here it is, \u2018I no longer wear the gold band on my finger.\u2019 \u2026\u2019Things I learned in a hobo jungle,\u2019 it\u2019s telling us, \u2018Okay, you didn\u2019t go to school, your father died.\u2019 \u2026He gave me so much material.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHighway 99, the stretch of road that gives the film its title, runs through California\u2019s Central Valley \u2013 through Tulare, Visalia, Fresno, Merced, Turlock, Modesto, Stockton, Yuba City, Chico. And Oildale too. It goes up through Shasta County, where Merle Haggard died in 2016, on his birthday, at the age of 79. Highway 99 was the road at the beginnings of his life and at his end, the road that took him away and the road that brought him home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Merle Haggard was an escape artist. The future country music legend broke out of juvenile hall and prison…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":190212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,85205,105889,13213,53,104193,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-190211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ethan-hawke","10":"tag-highway-99-a-double-album","11":"tag-merle-haggard","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-telluride-film-festival","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}