Merle Haggard Doc d’Ethan Hawke

Nine years after the death of Merle Haggard at 79, Ethan Hawke organized a public wake, and it’s a humbinger. A biography through the road in California and the extravagance of study of studies, Highway 99: a double album Is, at its moving nucleus of the soul, a gathering of several dozen musicians singing the praises of the Great Country, mainly by singing his songs.

In a sense, Hawke does here what he did a few years ago The latest cinema starsHis documents portrait of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: he arouses a conversation on a legendary artist. This anterior doc felt more theoretical for two key reasons: Hawke’s research convos were confined to the zoom of the pandemic era, and the subject acted as opposed to music, with its more visceral immediacy. But although they are very different experiences, the three hours and the quarter Highway 99 is powered by the same exuberance that propels Movie stars.

The double album consists of 26 tracks, intimate performance of songs from the amazing work of Haggard. The film is divided into two parts, with a 15 -minute 15 -minute intermission of 15 minutes (with additional music, also wrapped), and the song performers include Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, Gillian Welch, John Doe, Steve Earle, Los Lobos and Valerie June. Each of the new performances reveals how finely the songs have aged. But it is in moments just after each song ends that Hawke often captures something deeper: the communion between singer and song, singer and composer, like the weight of what the interpreter has just channeled the colonists and changes.

The titles alone are a map of the human heart: “Mama’s Hungry Eyes”, “If we do it until December”, “The Bottle Let Me Down”, “Galler where the Lonely Go”, to cite just a handful of its hundreds of compositions, 40 of them. Sad stories are the bread and butter of country music, but Haggard explored this ground with a strange combination of frankness and euphemism – a “word economy” of heming, according to the clever evaluation of Bob Weir. Another person interviewed, Taj Mahal, says that Haggard was a key figure in creating a new kind of blues.

At the wheel of his father’s vintage black, Plymouth Barracuda, Hawke arrives on the road, Route 99 of the State of California, to be exact, in search of the roots of music and man. This North-South artery through the breach and the Ranchs of the Central Valley, notes Hawke, connects key places in the life of Haggard. It was a main artery during the 1930s, when the Dust Bowl attracted hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans, including the parents of Haggard, in Golden State. At stops along the way, and sometimes in the recording studio, Hawke reads aloud of the two Haggard autobiographies, Sing me at home And My souvenir house. No less than Haggard’s words, his prose contains a Wallop.

Working again with the skillful publisher Barry Poltermann, who reduced the Newman-Woodward series in Hawkes, Hawke plunges into archive wealth that include documents made during Haggard’s life. The interview with Dayton Duncan from the Ken Burns PBS 2019 series for Ken Burns Country music is a particularly strong element. The close -ups of the beautiful haggard face clashed shortly before his death was powerful in terms of terms, but especially in the context of the history of life, distilled with eloquence here.

It starts with the primitive injury of the death of his beloved father when Haggard was only 9 years old, during the years of absenteeism and the train and crime, multiple escapes of local prisons and almost three years in a maximum security prison. In the nine years following his release from San Quentin, Haggard was not only a leading figure in the kingdom of Bakersfield Sound, but he was the best country musician in the United States, with three singles n ° 1 in 1969 and a growing collection of industry prices.

The emotion is built in the second half of the doc with the ambivalence of Haggard on the success, the guilt of its wealth and the shame of its past, not to mention its laven, bankruptcy and five marriages, some much more brilliant than others. The story of his relationship with Bonnie Owens, his second wife, a creative partner and singer of harmony non-parents, is a love story for ages.

Hawke also conducts new interviews, especially with some of the children of Haggard and one of his women. Among these musicians offering comments but not playing, there is the dear Haggard Willie Nelson component and the indussion Dolly Parton, the object of unacceptable love of Haggard when they turned together.

Highway 99 is also a reflected counterpoint in the United States in force which has excessive simplifications which have pigeled Haggard as a right-wing Ideal on the basis of its 1969 tube “Okie de Muskogee” (a bit like the way in which his contemporary Bob Dylan was salted to be the voice of the counter-culture). “Okie” was generally adopted by the conservatives and insulted by the hippies, the gray area between its serious complaint and its cheeky humor rarely recognized. But Haggard, like most people who do not adhere to strict festive lines, had the courage to rethink your positions and back down. Its comfort with contradictions and complications, underlines Rosanne Cash, was not easily accepted at the time, and is certainly not today.

This brings this kinetic and dynamic documentary back to music that Hawke, ravaged and searches, considers the key to understanding the man and the artist. It is personal for him – it was his father that he learned to love country music. Not all contributions to the first person of the documentary did not hinder the procedure, but here the quest strikes all the right notes, and the gathering of voices looks like a starting point rather than a summary.