Merle Haggard

Tim Buchanan's year-end list includes selections by Willi Carlisle, Tyler Childers, Melissa Carper and more.

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Haggard's biographer Marc Eliot about his book: The Hag. Haggard spent his early years going from family tragedy to odd jobs to broken marriages to petty crime to prison.

After John Prine died last year, Sturgill Simpson offered to cover the song "Paradise" for the upcoming tribute album "Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2."

Bakersfield, California, is known as "Nashville West."

NPR Music remembers musicians — singers, songwriters, instrumentalists — and other visionaries we lost in 2016. Explore and celebrate their musical legacies.

Haggard, who died April 6, was singularly rebellious and rootless, and his songs are a graduate course in everything timeless and true about music, says the Drive-By Truckers singer.

"I was probably the most incorrigible child you could ever meet," the legendary singer once told NPR. "I was already on the way to prison before I realized it."

Outlaw, "Okie from Muskogee," poet of working-class values and a fixture in country music for 50 years, Merle Haggard died Wednesday, April 6, his 79th birthday.

The country singer reflects on his time in prison and several of his greatest hits in conversation with Terry Gross in 1995.