On February 9, 2016, Merle Haggard walked across the road from his house to his own studio and recorded “Kern River Blues.” He was 78, still weak from double pneumonia, and he had written the song between hospital stays. Standing beside him on electric guitar was his youngest son, Ben. It would be the last song Merle Haggard ever recorded.
Less than two months later, he was gone. The song stayed in the can until his family decided what to do with it.
A winter spent in hospital rooms
The final months of Merle Haggard’s life were a fight with pneumonia. He spent long stretches in the hospital that winter, and the illness forced him to cancel tour dates. One of them was a December concert at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, which had to be pushed back to February.
His doctors advised him not to go back on the road. For a man who had toured for more than half a century, that was hard advice to take, and he did not fully take it.
What he could do from a hospital bed was write. During those weeks, he worked on new songs, and when he was well enough to go home, he carried them with him.
The walk across the road
Home was his ranch at Palo Cedro, near Redding in Northern California. His studio, Hag Studio, sat just across the road from the house. On February 9, Merle made the short walk over and cut “Kern River Blues.”
The band in the room that day was a mix of old and young. Norm Hamlet, who had played steel guitar with Merle and the Strangers since the 1960s, was there. So were Scott Joss on acoustic guitar, Doug Colosio on bass, Jimmy Christie on drums and Renato Caranto on horns. And on electric guitar was Ben Haggard, who had joined his father’s band as lead guitarist at just 15.
Merle set the song to a loose, shuffling blues rhythm in the style of Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman” he had loved since he was a boy. Back in 1969 he had recorded an entire album of Rodgers songs. Nearly fifty years later, his final song came back to that same sound.
A song about leaving Oildale
“Kern River Blues” looks back at Oildale, the oil town just across the Kern River from Bakersfield where Merle grew up. His family had come west from Oklahoma in the 1930s, and his father turned an old refrigerated railroad boxcar into the family home. That is where Merle was raised.
In the song, Merle is leaving town. He watches Oildale fade from the window, says the hard times of the 1930s feel no different from hard times today, and remembers a river that once ran deep and wide before the water was taken and the politicians made their promises. In the last verse he says goodbye for good, to the town, to an old boxcar, and to a river that has gone dry.
The Kern River had been in his songs before. In 1985, “Kern River” became a Top 10 country hit for him. But this new song was more personal, a goodbye to a place rather than a story set there.
The boxcar itself had been on his mind. In January 2015, Merle went back to the old house at 1303 Yosemite Drive in Oildale before it was moved to the Kern County Museum. Ben went with him. A newspaper photographer caught Merle standing in what had been his childhood bedroom inside the converted boxcar.
“It’s been a long time.” — Merle Haggard, visiting his boyhood home in January 2015
A year later, he was singing about kissing that boxcar goodbye.
Four days later in Oakland
On February 13, four days after the session, Merle played the rescheduled show at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. Nobody knew it would be his last concert.
Ben was on lead guitar. Jill Fordyce, a Bakersfield native who was in the audience, later wrote about the band watching over Merle that night and leaving extra space between songs. During Ben’s guitar solo, she noticed, Merle turned away from the crowd to face his son and simply watched him play until the solo was over.
A thank-you to the fans
Merle Haggard died at home in Palo Cedro on April 6, 2016. It was his 79th birthday.
Messages, prayers and memories poured in from fans around the world. His family wanted a way to answer them, and they found it in the song from February 9.
“They were searching for a way of thanking everyone and decided to release this song.” — statement from the Merle Haggard estate
In May, Bakersfield held its own memorial for him. His sister Lillian, who had grown up beside him in that boxcar, read the lyrics of “Kern River Blues” to the people gathered there.
On May 12, 2016, the song premiered on Willie’s Roadhouse, Willie Nelson’s SiriusXM channel. The channel had been renamed Merle’s Roadhouse for the weekend after Merle died. “Kern River Blues” then went on sale through his website and iTunes, with ten percent of all gross proceeds going to charities that help homeless people.
The last song
Merle Haggard left behind hundreds of unreleased songs, so more of his music may still surface. But “Kern River Blues” is the last one he recorded. It is a song about leaving home for good, sung by a man who had come back to that home in his songs again and again.
The guitar answering him on it belonged to Ben.
Do you remember the first time you heard “Kern River Blues,” or the first Merle Haggard song that stayed with you?