The song was “Listening (To the Wind).” When Merle Haggard introduced it from a concert stage in 1997, he told the crowd that only one person in the United States had heard it so far: his older brother, Lowell Haggard. Lowell had died the year before.
What Merle said before he sang
The moment survives on a live recording from 1997. Before the first chord, Merle explained that this next number was one he would sing himself, and that it was one of the newest songs he had written. Then he told the crowd that nobody in the United States had heard it yet, with one exception.
“…except my brother who passed away last year.”
He dedicated the song to Lowell and started to play.
There was no long speech. He did not say the song was written about his brother, and he did not explain what it meant. He only said who had heard it first.
Who Lowell Haggard was to Merle
James Lowell Haggard was born in Oklahoma on November 10, 1922, almost fifteen years before Merle. He went by his middle name. The family came west to the Bakersfield area during the Depression, and Merle was born there in 1937, in a converted boxcar his father had fixed up into a home.
Their father died in 1946, when Merle was nine. The loss stayed with Merle for the rest of his life. Three years later, it was Lowell who gave his little brother his guitar. Merle taught himself to play it by listening to records by Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.
Lowell was there for the worst years, too. Merle spent his teens in and out of trouble. After he escaped from the Bakersfield jail in the late 1950s, he was caught at his brother’s house in Lamont, about 25 miles away, and was soon on his way to San Quentin.
When Merle was released in 1960, he went back to Bakersfield and took work digging ditches for Lowell’s electrical contracting company. Within a couple of years he was playing music full time, and the rest became country music history.
Lowell Haggard died on December 11, 1996, in Kern County, California. He was 74. He was buried at Greenlawn Cemetery in Bakersfield, near their parents.
The song itself
“Listening (To the Wind)” is one of the quietest things Merle Haggard ever wrote. There is no story to follow and no chorus to shout along with. A man listens to the wind and the breeze moving through the poplar trees, to the sound of a highway in some faraway town, to the night itself. He is trying to hear a friend who is a long way off. He wishes the two of them were close again, and he wonders if that friend is listening too.
In that introduction, Merle did not say who the song was about, and listeners are left to decide for themselves who the “distant friend” might be. Merle wrote it alone; no co-writer is credited. What the 1997 recording does make clear is that the first person to hear the song was gone by the time anyone else did.
Three years later, it closed the album
Merle did not release the song right away. It finally came out on October 10, 2000, on If I Could Only Fly, his 50th studio album, issued by the independent label ANTI-. The record was made at his own studio in California.
Critics took notice. AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that it was the first Haggard album in years that deserved to be compared with his classic work. It reached No. 26 on the Billboard country albums chart and No. 10 on the independent albums chart. The title track, written by Texas songwriter Blaze Foley, drew most of the attention.
“Listening (To the Wind)” sits in the very last spot. It is track 12 of 12, just over four minutes long. After everything else on the album, it is the last song you hear.
Where the Haggards rest
Lowell still lies at Greenlawn in Bakersfield. In October 2024, their sister Lillian, who had stood by Merle for most of his life, died at 103 and was laid to rest beside Lowell and their parents. Merle, who died on his 79th birthday in 2016, is buried farther north, near his ranch outside Redding.
Most fans know Merle Haggard for “Mama Tried,” “Sing Me Back Home” and “Okie from Muskogee.” This one was never a hit single. But on one night in 1997, it was a song Merle said only his brother had heard, and he sang it for a brother who was no longer there to hear it again.
Did you know the story behind this one the first time you heard it?