Merle Haggard is recuperating at a Bakersfield, Calif., hospital after undergoing surgery Monday (Nov. 3) to remove a cancerous growth from his right lung. In August, the 71-year-old Country Music Hall of Fame member told The Californian newspaper in Bakersfield that the growth was discovered in May. He said the tumor was not malignant and that he had no plans to have it removed. In a message on Haggard's official Web site, his wife, Theresa, confirmed the surgery, noting that he is "doing better and better every day." She added, "Merle and I both believe strongly in our Lord Jesus Christ and His healing powers. After all, He is the greatest physician of all. Believing in our prayers to be answered is the key."

I HATE reading news like that. The cantankerous and sweet Merle Haggard... he should have been named California's poet laureate... with 38 songs reaching #1 on the country music charts, that's only the tip of the iceberg of the man's living legend status.

Merle Haggard's music may be pure country - and that in and of itself turns a lot of people away before they even consider him.

But your rock n roll idols can't be wrong---- I have seen Bob Dylan and Keith Richards both perform Hag's 1968 hit song "Sing Me Back Home" and they both performed the song faithfully and without the usual fucking up and re-arranging it to make it their own... its a testament to Hag's work of beauty in that composition.

He's an iconoclast. "Okie From Muskogee," one of Hag's better known songs is often mis-interpreted as his political statement as a conservative. No! It was all tongue in cheek. Hag himself said that the song was a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time."

Hag has always been anti-war... his political sentiments are close to my own... could be why I take to him so much... but the truth is, I find him to be a perfect example of what a Real American Man should be. He's also a true Californian - not a Big Media City Californian like I am - he's from Bakersfield, the heart of CA's working class population... but he is a Californian nonetheless, and he together with Buck Owens created and forged The Bakersfield Sound. In rock n roll terms - it was like The Bakersfield Sound was a reaction to the Nashville (Nashvegas) sound the same way punk rock was a reaction to classic rock. Both country genres used strings - but Nashville used syruppy orchestrals and Bakersfield wielded a wild fiddle... Bakersfield was a working class town full of honky tonks and transplanted people from the Great Plains who brought their rock n roll influenced country with them.

Whenever I hear an older person has cancer, it scares me into taking stock of their life and accomplishments... and I also wonder how I'm gonna die.

Don't wait til Hag's gone... discover him now!