Merle Haggard and the Strangers

Haggard, paroled from San Quentin in 1960, found his first steady work playing bass for Wynn Stewart in Las Vegas, where Roy Nichols was Stewart’s guitarist. Nichols, who had played with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Lefty Frizzell and Johnny Cash, is on Haggard’s first sessions for Fuzzy Owen’s Tally label from about October 1963, with Ralph Mooney on steel, Helen Price on drums and George French on piano; Nichols stayed in Stewart’s band until Haggard formed the Strangers in 1965. Tally’s fourth Haggard single, “(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers,” reached the Top Ten in 1965, Haggard moved to Capitol, and his first album was called Strangers. By 1966 the band was being billed as Merle Haggard and the Strangers, as on a live recording from the Nugget in Reno.

In the studio Capitol’s producer Ken Nelson and Fuzzy Owen often used Hollywood session players, but the band’s core increasingly made the records. The steel guitarist Norm Hamlet was on the sessions by September 1967, and on 9 May 1968 Nichols and Hamlet played on “Mama Tried”; both were also on the studio “Okie from Muskogee” in July 1969 and on the live album recorded at the Civic Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on 10 October 1969. By the live recording at Philadelphia’s Civic Center on 14 February 1970 the Strangers were Nichols on lead guitar and harmonica, Bobby Wayne on rhythm guitar, Hamlet on steel and Dobro, Dennis Hromek on bass, Biff Adam on drums and Bonnie Owens, then Haggard’s wife, singing harmony.

The band played for Richard Nixon at the White House in 1973 and at a barbecue on Ronald Reagan’s ranch in 1982. By the late 1970s it included the former Reno & Smiley mandolinist Ronnie Reno on rhythm guitar, the fiddlers Gordon Terry and Paul Anastasio, and Don Markham on horns; a 1984 session in Nashville added the fiddlers Tiny Moore and Jimmy Belken. Nichols left in 1987, after twenty-two years, and the Concord Pavilion recordings of that year show a band of Adam, Belken, Hamlet, Markham, Wayne, the trumpeter Gary Church, the keyboard player Mark Yeary and the lead guitarist Clint Strong.

Haggard took pride in the band’s musicianship and treated its members as more than sidemen. The Strangers stayed with him until his death on his 79th birthday, 6 April 2016.