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This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Black Friday Game day on prime is an epic day of live sports. It all starts at 9am Eastern with the Capital One skins game. Then Black Friday football returns with when the Bears take on The Eagles at 3pm and it culminates with the final night of Emirates NBA Cub group play with Bucks Knicks at 7pm and Mavs Lakers at 10pm Black Friday game day only on Prime. Years later, when Merle Haggard was busy sending 38 songs to the top of the country charts, Johnny Cash told him, hag, you're the guy people think I am. Johnny Cash had that outlaw chic on lock. One of the most famous songs, Folsom Prison Blues, is about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. But Johnny Cash didn't live the life of a criminal. Not like Merle Haggard. Merle's songs, both his originals and the ones he made his own, were all rooted in truth. A truth that he lived. Merle. Merle Haggard was authentic. Johnny Cash knew this. Merle didn't just sing about being a lonesome fugitive. He was a lonesome fugitive. His mama did try to raise him better. He did turn 21 in prison. Okay, he wasn't doing life without parole, but that sounds a whole lot better as a lyric than doing an indeterminate sentence of six months to 15 years. And as yet another Merle song goes, he'd been everywhere he Talked about. He did it all. He even got arrested. Inside prison. He woke up on a cold cement slab. He tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness of the tiny room, but his eyes hurt like hell. His head was pounding. That prison hooch may have gotten him good in a shit face, but it left behind one hell of a hangover. He remembered hearing the sound of the 30:30 cocking and then the guard yelling his name from up on the catwalk. But he didn't remember being brought down in here. Didn't matter. He knew where he was. Everyone on the inside knew about this place. They called it the Shelf. The sixth floor of the north block. Sometimes a guard brought him a mattress. Hours later, another guard would come take it away. He didn't have a pillow, so he used the Bible that he found in the corner for a place to lay his head. Seven days of this. Seven days of being stuck inside his own head. But Merle Haggard wasn't alone. He heard voices. Voices that weren't his own. Sometimes they were muffled, and other times they were clear as a bell. Jesus, he was going insane. His own mind finally turned on him, just like the parole board and Leona and everyone else. He tried to think of nothing. Not the fermented orange peels on his wife, not a pair of some other girl's tits, and definitely not a train. Just nothing. That only made things worse, though. The voices got clearer. His eyes scanned the dark room. There was an air vent on the wall. He scooted closer to it, and the voices got louder. Guess what I got in the goddamn mail, the first voice said. A second voice quickly answered. Can't guess. What is it? I got a life insurance policy. Can you believe that? The men's laughter echoed inside the air vent. 100% bonafide, gallows humor. Merle didn't recognize the second voice, but he knew the first. Everyone on the inside knew that voice. Everyone on the outside, too. That voice belonged to the most famous prisoner in America, Carol Chessman, AKA the Red Light Bandit. San Quentin's celebrity death row inmate for nearly a decade. Now he was facing the gas chamber for two counts of sexual assault committed during a crime spree. He said he was innocent. He fought his fate with appeal after appeal. Close to 50 in total. Sometimes he was walked down to the chamber just minutes from death. When a call came through that he'd been given another stay of execution, Merle decided at last to speak up. He was going to go crazy if he did not talk to someone else for seven days. Chessman. Carol Chessman acknowledged Merle's voice. How's your appeal going? Very well, chessman answered. I just talked to my attorney. He isn't worried at all. Chessman sounded so calm, so Zen. The guy had to be off his nut. A place like San Quentin just didn't give up. A guy like Carroll Chessman, it didn't matter if he was guilty or not. He was there now, in the belly of the beast, inside a 9 by 5 room on death row, just prolonging the inevitable. Merle Haggard could see the inevitable more clearly than ever before. It flashed before his eyes. Not his life at first. His death. He thought about 5, 10, 15 more years inside San Quentin, if he ever made it that long. He could catch the end of a sharp knife or a clenched fist. Maybe worse. He saw his own body twitching on the floor of the mess hall, bleeding out from his head. He watched as a withered up shell of his former self wheezed out his final breath. In the corner of the shelf. He heard the hiss of gas in the chamber as the bag of cyanide hit the acid. His eyeballs started to swell until they were too big to fit in their sockets and they just burst wide open. Merle shuddered. He didn't want to ever find out what any of that felt like. He didn't want to end up like Rabbit or like Carol Chessman. Chessman was eventually led inside St. Quentin's infamous gas chamber one last time and never came out. Once again, Merle and the others watched from the yard as gray smoke coughed out of the chimney above death row. He didn't let it get to him. In fact, it galvanized him. He was going to get out of San Quentin. It would be hard doing anything. The honest way was hard, but he wasn't going out. Like Chessman, he took orders and did as he was told. That was some bullshit for sure, but it was necessary. The prison textile factory was the hardest gig on the inside, so he had a focus. Show them he could do the work. He got good marks. His close custody designation was lifted. Soon he had more time with his guitar. He could play in the warden's band. He was becoming a model prisoner, a guy determined to make a second pool. He was living his truth. Anyone could see that, even Johnny Cash. But on New year's day of 1959, Johnny Cash didn't know Merle Haggard from a hole in one of San Quentin's walls. To Cash, Merle was just another criminal doing time, another face in a sea of inmates gathered to listen to Johnny Cash and his Band perform right there in prison. Merle Haggard, on the other hand, knew exactly who Johnny Cash was. Not the iconic country superstar that he would later become and not the good Samaritan who was making a habit of performing at prisons. For a portion of the population that the rest of society ignored, Johnny Cash was the man who made Murrell and every last prisoner in San Quentin forget where they were that day. Backed by the Tennessee 2, Marshall Grant on bass and Luther Perkins on Qatar, along with his future wife, June Carter, Johnny Cash made the walls of the house place disappear. His baritone went into his microphone and it came out of the speakers and the room changed. San Quentin was no longer a prison. There were no blood curdling screams resonating through the hallways. No puffs of gray smoke rising from the chimney above death row. There was no death row. There was just music. And where there was music, there was escape. Merle Haggard sat up front, listened. He heard his escape plan. It was there. And Johnny Cash's voice and the click clacking of Marshall Grant's stand up bass. It sounded like the trains he used to listen to as a kid. Johnny Cash didn't know it, but at that moment he set Merle Haggard. The door to the big Bakersfield house swung wide open and Merle Haggard stood in the doorway, the low California desert at his back. He had to pinch himself as he crossed the threshold and stepped inside. He could hardly believe believe that this place belonged to him. It was a mansion, the fancy kind of home in the nice part of town his family never could have afforded back when Merle was a kid. Back when Okies weren't even welcome on this side of the tracks. Merle Haggard had three things on his side now. Time, fame, and money. The money lined his pockets. The money kept rolling in, just like the Southern Pacific headed east. Merle didn't know know what to do with himself. There was so much of it. Sometimes he looked in the mirror and didn't even recognize the guy looking back at him. Just four years earlier, in November of 1960, he walked through an entirely different front door. Though this time he was headed out and not in. He left San Quentin in the dust, paroled after two years and nine months of that indefinite sentence on account of good behavior and a strong work ethic. Hearing that parole roll the hard way day after day in the textile factory. The work was tough. But with Carol Chessman's departure and Johnny Cash's arrival weighing heavy on his mind, he persevered. He was no longer a lonesome fugitive. He returned home and made an effort to work things out with Leona. In fact, she was pregnant again by Merle this time. But she never really forgave him for doing the things he did. For spending so much of their time together locked up some somewhere. He'd even missed the birth of one of his children while he sat in a cell. And just because he was no longer in prison didn't mean Leona saw much more of him. Merle found work, honest work, playing for guys like Buck Owens and Win Stewart. Playing meant late nights out at the clubs in Bakersfield or even touring around California and Nevada, while Leona was stuck at home playing housewife. She knew what he did on those late nights and long tries. He was. It was an escape in more ways than one. An escape from home, an escape from her. Every time he came home, they fought. Leona didn't give a shit about his sturdy voice, the one that rang pure as a bell and could mimic any of the greats. The one that blew away his hero, Lefty Frizzell. To her, Merle's authenticity was not a selling point, but instead a black mark on his name. Merle knew he could prove her wrong. He was going to make her a believer in him. First, he made Capitol Records a believer. They made a bet on an ex con when they signed Merle to a record deal. And the bet paid off huge. The money started rolling in. One of his first singles, Sing a Sad Song, went to number 19 on the Billboard country chart. My Friends Are Going to Be strangers, released in November 1964, went all the way to number 10. It was his latest hit that Merle was hoping to celebrate as he stepped inside his new Bakersfield home. But something wasn't right. He knew it before he even opened the door. His 57 Chevy was missing from the driveway. The lawn was covered in junk. Papers and toys and debris were everywhere. Inside, the rank smell of ammonia hit his nose. Dirty diapers were splayed all over the floor. Cupboards were emptied and chairs were overturned and trash was strewn on furniture and countertops. And Leona was gone. So were the kids. From outside he heard the sound of a lonesome whistle, the clattering of boxcars banging down the railroad tracks. He wondered where the freight was going. He no longer had the urge to run. He didn't do that anymore, hop trains. But he did move forward. Every day was a song. One that he wrote and another that he lived. There was no turning back, even if the road ahead was bumpy. Forward was the way through, the only way to be free. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com Membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland and ad free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad man.