Merle Haggard Graduates High School At Age 78 With Special Ceremony
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/merle-haggard-graduates-high-school-with-special-ceremony-20150428
Merle Haggard is a three-time Grammy winner, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the recipient of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honor. The legendary "poet of the common man" also holds an honorary doctorate from California State University in Bakersfield. Now, the 78-year-old proves you're never too old — or accomplished — to receive something most young students take for granted: a high school diploma.
Six decades after attending Bakersfield High School (for less than two weeks), Haggard has received his diploma, in spite of having never passed a single class before dropping out as a freshman. The Bakersfield Californian reports that David Reese, Bakersfield High School principal, and Don Hemingway, one of the Hag's grade-school classmates, urged his alma mater to honor the singer-songwriter as a fellow "Driller," in spite of his less-than-impressive academic record.
Haggard was presented with his long-awaited sheepskin at an informal gathering in an alley outside Bakersfield's Fox Theater on Saturday afternoon. "But I was only there nine days," the bemused entertainer said as he was handed the blue-and-white-framed document.
Haggard, whose older sister, Lillian Haggard Rea, was registrar at the high school at the same time her brother was routinely truant, had arranged with a counselor to have the future country icon sent to Juvenile Hall to straighten him out. It didn't work…not right away, anyway. In 1958, Haggard would serve a little less than two years at San Quentin State Prison for burglary. As an inmate at San Quentin, Haggard witnessed a performance by country giant Johnny Cash, which he would credit for finally turning things around and setting him on his own path to superstardom. In 1972, he was pardoned by then-California Governor Ronald Reagan.
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It was bulldozed maybe ten years ago, some kind of office building was built where it stood.
But in its heyday, I saw performers like Dr. John, BB King, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Buddy Guy, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell, and...
...a double bill of Merle and George.
They each performed for only 30 minutes or so. There was some drunken doofus in the audience who yelled "OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! OKEE FUMMA SKOGEE! " at the end of EVERY SONG. Naturally, Merle performed it last.
So at the end, this guy yelled "THANK YA, MERLE!"
The theater, as the name implied, had a small, round, revolving stage. Emmylou hated it and told the audience "YOU should be revolving, not me."
...he drove the writer around his property in a golf cart, through acre after acre of weed. Seems Merle is a connoisseur, just like Willie. A lot of people took the song far too literally, as if it were a manifesto and code of living from Merle. Realize this is the guy who saw Johnny Cash in prison and was inspired to turn his life around. Johnny Cash, who was traveling to a gig with Carl Perkins one night and woke up in the car, upside down, in a ditch, because he had taken so many little white pills to stay awake that eventually he just crashed and slept it off.
The Beach Boys got the joke:
that it's never too late! 
