Merle Haggard sounds every bit his 71 years of age. The rough-hewed voice and raspy cackle are well-earned: From his train-hopping youth in Bakersfield to his stint in San Quentin Prison for robbery, where he first saw Johnny Cash perform, to his hard-fought sobriety, Haggard’s authenticity of experience can’t be questioned. Never one to rest on his laurels, Haggard continues to tour and record (last year’s tour and record The Last of the Breed with Willie Nelson and Ray Price was by all accounts outstanding). He’s also angry with what he feels is the government’s fear-based ruling (and, believe it or not, he even wrote a supportive song for Hillary Clinton). The Hag’s latest album, The Bluegrass Sessions, sees him striking out in new directions while staying true to his straight-shootin’ roots.

You’ve had 38 #1 country hits. Why bluegrass now?

Ah, just something I hadn’t done. It’s one form of country music that still allows you to sing out of key. It’s a realism of bluegrass that attracted me to it. They aren’t into using the studio tuners and all that. That’s sort of my style, too.

There’s the famous story about you talking to Johnny Cash on his television after you had gotten out of San Quentin and saying how you enjoyed one of his early prison shows and Cash saying, “Merle, I don’t believe you were on those shows.” And you telling him you were a member of the audience. That show became quite a popular album and one of them is now out on DVD. Did you ever listen to that show?

First of all, the show that I listened to was not the same one you hear. The one I heard was in 1958 and they didn’t record it because he didn’t have a voice that day. He was playing his first prison show on January 1st of 1958 and that was the show that I saw him at. I talked to him about it on his show in 1970, where he had his own network television show. We’d been friends for quite some time but he didn’t know I’d been in that audience. He didn’t know I was there and one day I asked him, “What about that show where you didn’t have no voice and you were still able to pull it off?” He jerked his head around and looked at me real funny and I explained it all to him.

You’ve said, “I don’t like all of country music. In fact, I like very little of it.”

That’s true. I just have certain people that I like in country: I like Johnny Cash, Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan. There’s a whole lot of it that just doesn’t have any effect on me at all. I don’t dislike. I don’t spend a lot of time listening to it. I don’t buy records and the people that I listen to are pretty obvious.

The name of your previous album with Willie Nelson and Ray Price is called Last of the Breed. If that’s indeed true, which I think it is, who, for you, are the torchbearers? Who are those doing right by the breed or tradition?

I don’t think music will allow them to do it. If somebody wanted to record in a manner in which we recorded that bluegrass album in, unless they had some clout and a lot of hit records behind them, nobody would let me do it in fear they might hear a bad note. Humanity has been outlawed in music.

Sort of dehumanized in a certain way.

Yeah. It’s really so. It’s really a shame that you can’t even hear a person breathe on the microphone. They even spend time sucking the breath out of the song. They sit there and run it back and forth and use some method of extracting a breath. You used to hear Elvis breathe, you could hear Johnny Cash make a mistake once in a while. But there is no chance of that anymore. Sometimes words are mold and sometimes they are pretty.

I was surprised to hear you say you have to stay politically neutral when performing. It seems there’s always been a place for politics and social commentary in music, particularly yours.

I’d like to stay neutral. Like you’re saying, it’s pretty hard to stay neutral with people preaching fear. I’m not for it, being afraid. I don’t think this country should run under the porch and I don’t think we should live with fear in our mind. I think we should be proud and we should live exactly the same way we lived before 9/11 or otherwise we have lost the war. No matter what happens to Al Qaeda, we’ve lost the war. They’ve made us afraid. Is it them or is it us who has breached freedom? Who is responsible for the fear? I don’t think the soldiers that go to war would be proud of fear.

We were initially founded as a Grateful Dead magazine and, in fact, that’s where I first encountered your music—the Dead’s versions of “Mama Tried” and particularly “Sing Me Back Home,” which I found incredibly moving and almost spiritual-like. Did you ever have the opportunity to hear them do your songs?

Yes, in fact The Dead and The Stones and Dylan and people like that are friends of mine. Keith Richards is my friend. They’re more familiar at the moment than kids listening to country music nowadays. I find a more friendly audience working with people like that than working with country artists. There is more interest there. I was raised in Baskerville. We played rock ‘n’ roll in the nightclubs where I grew up and where I got my chops and all that. Really, I’m probably more a rock ‘n’ roller than I ever was a hillbilly. Either way, if somebody likes me to be a hillbilly, I’ll be that. But bluegrass music is one of the things in America that has remained the same. They are not afraid to do it the way they want to do it. And that’s one of the reasons why I love bluegrass.

Bakersfield seems like an unlikely place for creativity. What about it do you think contributed to the talents of you, Buck Owens and Gram Parsons?

It has no resemblance to the place we grew up and the time when music came out of it. It has no resemblance to what it is now. I don’t blame you for wondering where it came from because I go through there and say, “What in the hell has occurred here?” But music is the farthest thing from their mind down there right now. In fact, I look for them to outlaw it. There is a county up in Washington State, right next to the Canadian line, that has outlawed dancing and drinking. That’s right: that’s going on in America. I played a show for them and they said don’t even joke about it.

Of late, I’ve been encountering conversations about who the country’s greatest songwriter is: Dylan, Hank, Guthrie or, the dark horse, Townes Van Zandt. How do you weigh in?

It’s a great compliment to have you throw me in with those names. The majority of those names are from the past, way in the past. I doubt that Woody Guthrie would recognize this country and I’m sure that Jimmy Rogers wouldn’t although I think Jimmy had an insight into what was coming. His songs seem to be almost current in some way.

What’s the farthest you got from Bakersfield hopping trains?

I hitchhiked away from California to Texas and I rode a freight train back from Texas one time. Short hops was more my style, 100 miles, something like that. I remember one time when I was 11 years old I rode one from Bakersfield to Fresno; that was about 110 miles. But it wasn’t an everyday occurrence. It was just a way of getting away and it also had some romance to it. The songs I had grown up listening to talked about it and I wanted to see what they were talking about.

You’ve been bestowed with a number of different honors. Is there one that means the most or a little more to you than the rest?

My pardon from Ronald Reagan is the most important thing I’ve ever received. It gave me the right to travel form state to state and out of the country. Without that I would have been handcuffed, you know?

Anything ever elude you?

I just want to remain healthy and I want my family to remain healthy. I’m more interested in finding ways to stay off of beta-blockers and things they’d like me to take at my age. It’s really hard to stay straight and sober because they don’t want you that way. They want you to be drunk in the manner they want you to be drunk in.

It has to be hard for recovering addicts when they start giving you pills and meds.

Somebody ought to do an article on the effects of narcotics in the music. When did speed first show its ugly head in music? I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. The Japanese invented it [methamphetamine] in 1919 and the Charleston came about in the ‘20s. You can follow it all the way through and it’s been said that when they took methamphetamine off the market in pill form they set music back 40 years. It may be true.

Certainly drugs played a big part in jazz.

People cannot get ready at nine o’clock. That lady that died here recently that was in the 700 club? She’d tear up and cry every night at nine o’clock. People cannot turn up and play every night at nine o’clock without some help. It used to be accepted, well, if you are a musician you can take dope and we won’t bother you. Now that’s not the case so we have music like we have it and it’s not worth a shit.

Obviously there are ways to do that without drugs—you do it.

Yeah, I know and it’s hard to do. It’s real hard to do but I do it and I do it straight. God it’s hard to do.

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