A country music outlaw. For over six decades Merle Haggard composed and performed one of the greatest repertoires in country music, capturing the American condition with his stories of the poor, the lost, the working class, heartbroken, and hardliving.

Haggard didn’t have to look far for material. His greatest songs – the Depressionera poverty described in “Hungry Eyes,” the prison diaries “Sing Me Back Home” and “Mama Tried,” the hardliving anthems like “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” and “Back to the Barrooms” – were all taken from the pages of his own life.