Merle Haggard earned his “outlaw country” moniker honestly. After various stints in juvenile detention centers for offenses like truancy and petty larceny, the Hag graduated to robbery in 1956, ...

Merle Haggard‘s early years, marked by minor crimes such as truancy, theft, shoplifting, and petty larceny, are well-documented. But in the early ’80s, he became a victim of a not-so-petty crime. On ...

Throughout his career—and he kept working right until his death on April 6, 2016, a day that happened to be his 79th birthday—Merle Haggard tied the past to the present, and wound up pointing toward ...