It started with Jimmie Rodgers... and down that track in 1997 Willie Nelson told me if I wanted to make a movie on Jimmie Rodgers that I needed to talk to Merle Haggard ... as I gazed at him through the sweet smoke...I thought to myself that is easy for you to say. A few years down the track I hooked up with Haggard and for the last 12 years of his life I wrote and filmed. On a night in February of 2016, we were on his bus before the last show he would ever again kick out the floor lights at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California. Two nights past we did a show in Beverly Hills with Kris Kristofferson, one of his dearest of friends and brother in arms.
He was playing me two songs that he had been writing the past few days while his illness was slowing him down rapidly. He had been on an IV when I was with him on the bus in Beverly Hills and now in Oakland we were in some deep conversations that bring tears to my eyes now...there in the serious moments passing like a wild west runaway train...He told me "I am going to die on this bus...even if it kills me." Two months down the track he would die on his bus parked on his ranch in Palo Cedro, California.
I lead off on this site with working with Merle on two mainline tracks. First, the movie on Jimmie Rodgers, about his life and his train of influence that I had been working on for two decades before meeting Merle. Couple years before our first meeting, while working with Willie Nelson at a festival streaming his show at a festival from Kerrville, Texas celebrating Jimmie Rodgers life, where I told Willie that I wanted to make a documentary on Rodgers and go beyond the book that I was writing. Willie told me there on his bus, "If you want to know something about Jimmie Rodgers you need to talk to Merle Haggard. So my quest to find and meet the great Merle Haggard and do the vetting song and hoop dance began. After I was cleared to spend some time with Merle on his bus at a Martin Guitar party at the factory in Corona, California. After a few interviews and a number of shows on the road with Merle he asked me to help him with the biopic that he wanted done about his life.
WAITING for A TRAIN
Picture by Chris Felver
Three railroad men, one a writer and two past music legend's who's story tells the saga of the history of show business from the late 1880tys to 2025, from medicine shows to vaudeville, records to radio, movies to television to the Internet and beyond.
Jimmie Rodgers is the only entertainer that is in the Country, Rock, Blues, Songwriter and Grammy Halls of Fame, and also received the W.C. Handy Blues Award and the Life Time Achievement Grammy and is known as the Father of Country Music. Merle was greatly influenced by Jimmie and did a tribute album to him as did Lefty Frizzell, Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and many more. Go to JimmieRodgersSaga.com for more on "The Man That Started It All."