In the last winter of his life, Merle Haggard was too sick to tour and too worried about his band to stay home. Double pneumonia had already put him in the hospital. What he did over one week in February, in Las Vegas, in his own studio and on a stage in Oakland, turned out to be the last work of a career that had started, nearly six decades earlier, with a 20-year-old inmate at San Quentin.
A Winter in the Hospital
Haggard was hospitalized with double pneumonia in December 2015. Shows were postponed, including a concert at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland that was pushed from December to February. On February 2, 2016, he canceled a date at the Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside, California, and his camp announced that the rest of the month was off.
He played several of those shows anyway, and kept booking dates even as his lungs failed to recover.
The Job at Mandalay Bay
On February 6, 2016, Haggard was booked for a private event at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, the annual convention of Safari Club International. He was 78. According to Toby Keith, the show paid about three times what Merle was used to getting.
The money was not for him. Haggard told Keith that after so long off the road he was about to lose his band. One good payday could hold the Strangers together until he was well enough to tour again. Actor W. Earl Brown, a friend who was there that night, later put it simply: there was no calling in sick for this gig.
Keith was in Las Vegas for Super Bowl weekend and heard that Merle was playing. He went over to see him and found him on an oxygen hose. Haggard told him the soundcheck had been a wreck. Keith later said Merle looked really frail.
Toby Keith Takes the Setlist
Keith told Haggard he would be close by and to call him up whenever he needed him. In Keith’s memory, Merle made it through about eight songs before he called him out. Brown’s account, posted on Facebook, says it came after only a few songs, and that Merle asked Keith how many of his songs he knew. Keith said all of them.
Keith did not sing his own hits. He asked Merle what he wanted to play, and the answer was to keep going with the setlist. So Toby Keith stood on a ballroom stage and sang the rest of Merle Haggard’s show, with Merle’s band behind him.
Merle exited the stage with his dignity intact.
That was Brown’s verdict. Afterward, Keith said, Merle hugged his neck, told him he loved him and thanked him for helping him get his check. It was the last time Toby Keith saw Merle Haggard.
One More Song at Hag Studio
Three days later, on February 9, Haggard walked across the road from his house to his own studio near Palo Cedro, California. During his hospital stays he had kept writing, and one of those songs was Kern River Blues, a song about leaving Bakersfield.
His son Ben, who had been touring with him as lead guitarist, played electric guitar on the session. It was the last song Merle Haggard ever recorded. After his death, the family released it as a way of thanking his fans, with proceeds going to charities that help the homeless.
The Last Weekend on the Road
The next night he played the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa. On February 11 he shared a bill with his old friend Kris Kristofferson at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, where the Los Angeles Times noted that his voice was not quite at full strength.
On Saturday, February 13, 2016, he walked onto the stage of the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, the rescheduled show from December. The crowd stood before he sang a note. He opened with Big City and worked through Silver Wings, Mama Tried, Sing Me Back Home and The Bottle Let Me Down.
He talked plainly about the double pneumonia and apologized when he had trouble catching his breath. The band watched him closely and sometimes stretched out the instrumental breaks to give him more room between songs. Ben took the guitar leads. On Take Me Back to Tulsa, Merle picked up a fiddle and traded a breakdown with fiddler Scott Joss. Audience members later recalled him singing Blaze Foley’s If I Could Only Fly, a song he had recorded and championed for years.
The show ran about 90 minutes, 18 songs, and ended with Okie From Muskogee. There was no encore. Nobody in the theater knew it was the last concert Merle Haggard would ever give.
The Birthday
More dates were canceled as the pneumonia held on. About a week before his birthday, Haggard told his family when he expected to go. Ben shared it afterward on Facebook.
Dad told us he was gonna pass on his birthday, and he wasn’t wrong.
Merle Haggard died on April 6, 2016, in Palo Cedro, on the day he turned 79. His manager, Frank Mull, confirmed the death. Ben wrote that his father took his last breath surrounded by family and friends.
The Band He Was Trying to Keep
The Strangers had been with Haggard for most of his career. Pedal steel player Norm Hamlet had been with him for close to five decades and was still on the stage in Oakland. After Merle was gone, Hamlet kept playing those songs on the road with Merle’s sons, Ben and Noel.
That was the band Merle Haggard climbed onto a Las Vegas stage to protect, on an oxygen hose, two months before his 79th birthday. He did not finish the show that night. Toby Keith finished it for him, and the band got paid.