The first version of “Fishin' with Merle/Praying for Merle” was originally intended just as a get-well song and fan letter to my friend and one of my heroes, Merle Haggard, who had been having serious health problems for a couple years.
Summertime in Bakersfield always centered around that fun but dangerous Kern River, where tubing, swimming, fishing and picnicking filled the banks with young and old. Our friend Oscar Whittington, a great fiddle player, had a club called Democrat Hot Springs on the river. We spent a lot of time sitting in with the bands and having fun on the Kern. When I was off the road, I’d play two shows a night at the Inn, and we rehearsed every night after work. When Merle was off the road, he would come in late and practice playing that fiddle with my band.
Looking back, I realized I never really told him how great he was and what an influence he’d been in my life. I was hoping this get-well song would let him know how I felt. I spent the best part of a year writing this song about Merle and fishing in those roaring waters of the Kern, sitting on a river bank talking music to the man. Ironically, Merle spent that same year writing his last song “The Kern River Blues”, a song about the Kern River going dry, which was one of the reasons he left Bakersfield and moved to Lake Shasta.
I left Bakersfield and moved 70 miles south in the mountains to the Los Angeles National Forest in 1980, and the Kern River was still rolling then. In 1988 I moved to Nashville. I wrote the get-well song in 2015-16, and I didn’t know the river had dried up. We recorded it at Jay's Place on Music Row on April 6th, 2016. As we finished, it came over the news that the corps of engineer in California had released the water from Lake Isabella, and the Kern River was roaring wild again down the canyon to Bakersfield. Ten minutes later, it came on the radio that Merle Haggard had passed away. It was surreal...
All of us were stunned. It took me a month to get my bearings. I began to think how my dream of fishing with Merle was a metaphor. There are thousands of young singers and writers that were influenced by this man’s extraordinary grasp of the human condition. He also had the magic to touch us with his fantastic voice and musicianship. I thought, that’s what this song is all about. It took me over a year to rewrite this new “Fishin with Merle”. Now, I’m still wishing I was fishin’ with Merle...
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