Merle Haggard has been churning out albums for nearly 40 years,
fashioning a career as an iconoclastic country-music legend and scoring
dozens of hits — including that slap at the hippie generation, "Okie
from Muskogee." Now 70, "The Hag" has just made a foray into bluegrass:
The Bluegrass Sessions features revamped versions of songs both old and new.
One of the new tracks, "Learning to Live with Myself," was written in his bathtub — or at least, according to Haggard, "There was water everywhere."
"At my age, I've learned how to live with my spouse and I've learned how to live with my beautiful children," Haggard says. "I learned how to be friends with everybody and do everything. The only thing I hadn't learned how to do was to learn to live with myself. I think that's probably the hardest thing we all have to do. We can lie to everybody else, but you can't lie to yourself."
