The Unlikely Friendship Between Gram Parsons and Merle Haggard

After it was recently announced that Gram Parsons would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2026, it stimulated numerous discussions about Gram’s country music legacy. Some weigh Parsons as such a major contributor and influence, they think he should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame as well. Others see him as a lightweight, long hair, and “drug addict” that was rightfully booed off the Grand Ole Opry stage with the rest of The Byrds in the aftermath of their country album Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

However you feel about Gram Parsons, he definitely left his impact on the music, and country music specifically. His mentorship and championing of Country Music Hall of Famer Emmylou Harris, his role in influencing The Rolling Stones in a more country direction via their albums Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers—let alone his own solo albums and his time in The Flying Burrito Brothers—it makes it difficult to measure Gram’s country impact at zero, despite the protestations of some.

But one country music relationship of Gram Parsons that has rarely been explored or publicly broadcast is his interactions with country legend and California native Merle Haggard. On the surface the two came from completely different worlds, even if geographically the epicenter of their music was only about 100 miles apart across the California mountains from Bakersfield to Los Angeles. But Gram Parsons cited Merle Haggard as a primary influence, and sought to work with Haggard on multiple occasions.

Believe it or not, Gram Parsons almost made an album with Merle Haggard, and the collaboration was explored in-depth by both men. Even though it never happened, the story of how it almost did gives some insight into these two complex and important characters in country music history.

The relationship and interactions between Gram Parsons and Merle Haggard were detailed in the relatively recent Merle Haggard biography The Hag by Marc Eliot published in 2022.

When Gram Parsons moved to Los Angeles and started playing with The Byrds, he’s given heavy credit for pushing the band in a country direction, and specifically for compelling them to record the 1968 country album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and to record the album in Nashville to get that authentic country sound. One of the songs Parsons insisted must be on the album was Merle Haggard’s “Life In Prison.”

Though Parsons and The Byrds did not officially need Merle Haggard’s permission to cut the song, it was important to Parsons that he got permission anyway. So Gram traveled to Bakersfield, and requested an audience with Merle to get his blessing. Though the excuse to meet with Haggard was to get the “Life In Prison” okay, Parsons also wanted to explore collaborating with The Hag.

“He came to my house and we talked about what we were going to do .. It’s a form of flattery when someone records your music, when they accept it that way,” Merle was quoted about that first interaction.

So Merle Haggard signed off on it, and loosely agreed to work with Gram Parsons at some point in the future. But when schedules didn’t initially align, the idea was mothballed by both parties.

Just appreciate that this was in 1968, so three years before The Grateful Dead would cover Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.” Gram Parsons and The Byrds were the first of the California country bands to cover a Merle Haggard song proper. When Sweetheart of the Rodeo flopped initially (it’s now retrospectively considered a Byrds’ masterpiece), and The Byrds soon disbanded, Gram Parsons started hanging out with the Rolling Stones for a bit.

The Rolling Stones saw Gram Parsons very much like Gram Parsons saw Merle Haggard—the real deal. No different than Gram had persuaded The Byrds towards the beauty of country music, Parsons did the same for The Stones. Who was one of the primary artists Parsons was pushing at the Stones? Merle Haggard. That’s how you hear those country influences in Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and subsequent works.

Then fast forward to 1973. This is when Gram Parsons and Merle Haggard came moments away from recording an album with each other, and probably should have, if it wasn’t for the two’s substance and alcohol abuses.

Don’t get it wrong though; Merle Haggard was generally skeptical, if not outright repulsed by elements of the country rock secne that had sprouted up in his native California, especially since it was competing with himself and Buck Owens for attention from Capital Records, radio stations, and local venues. Merle apparently got ticked off one time when his manager Frank Mull played a tape of Linda Ronstadt singing “Silver Threads and Golden Needles.”

When the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band reached out to Merle to be a part of their landmark album Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Merle allegedly said he didn’t want to play “with a bunch of long-hair hippie types like the Dirt Band.”

But due to Gram’s graciousness back in 1968 before cutting “Life In Prison” for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Haggard had grown to see Gram Parsons as an exception. And according to accounts, Merle Haggard even liked Gram’s music. Gram said to Rolling Stone at the time about Merle, “He’s a nice, sweet cat.”

As part of the management of Merle Haggard’s career at the time, the idea was hatched that he should produce an album for another artist. It happened to be that the business manager for The Byrds named Eddie Tickner worked with the same lawyer that worked with Merle Haggard. So when it came time to pick the performer Merle Haggard would produce an album for, they picked Gram Parsons.

The collaboration started off great. Reportedly, the two spent hours together, playing with Merle’s electric train set like two kids, drinking, talking about country music, and getting along quite well. To Merle, he actually saw an opportunity by producing Gram Parsons bridge the gap between the old Bakersfield guard, and the new country rockers in Los Angeles.

As Marc Eliot recalls in the book The Hag, “Merle liked [Gram], at least in part because he saw producing Parsons as a way to expand the reach of his music into the cultural mainstream. Even though Parsons’s career had stalled between his departure from the Byrds and signing with A&M Records, his connections to the L.A. country rock scene were as authentic to Merle’s was to country.”

But despite the positive start, things went south from there, though not between Merle and Gram, but Merle and his then wife Bonnie Owens—incidentally, the ex of Buck Owens. Merle and Bonnie were fighting over an incident at a truck stop, and stressed over it, Merle went on a major bender. When the manager Eddie Tickner tried to get Merle to answer the door at his Holiday Inn room to sign the paperwork so the Haggard-produced Gram Parsons album could move forward, Merle refused to come to the door for anyone.

Meanwhile at the Roosevelt Hotel where Gram Parsons was staying, he got word that Merle was off his rocker, which started stressing him out, and next thing you know, Gram Parsons went on one of his legendary benders as well. Finally when Merle emerged, but then heard Gram was too gone to meet, Merle called the entire project off, at least at that time. Perhaps it could have been rekindled in the future, but there would be no future for Gram Parsons. He overdosed in Joshua Tree, CA on September 19th at the age of 26.

Merle Haggard told Exclaim in 2004, “I knew he liked my work and did a lot of my songs, so I was looking forward to working together. That was really a sad loss, because I think he had a lot of great work left in him.”

Who knows what might have been if Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens hadn’t gotten into a fight, Gram hadn’t gone off his own rocker, or died months later. Perhaps a Parsons Haggard partnership would have produced a major West Coast/Bakersfield project that would have codified and joined the two veins of California Country, and minted Southern California as the second epicenter and primary alternative to Nashville.

Often it’s the “what if” that makes the legacies of performers like Gram Parsons loom larger than their actual output. About the only thing that has held back Parson’s legacy for some country fans has been a lack of true country credibility—something a Merle Haggard-produced album could have bequeathed.

But the fact that Merle Haggard even considered it, and got so close that meetings were had, hands shaken, and contracts drafted speaks to the respect Merle had for Gram. And of course, Gram thought the world of The Hag.

Maybe the two worlds of West Coast country weren’t so disconnected and at odds after all.

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