Branded man Merle Haggard brings his Bakersfield sound east with Dylan BY TED DROZDOWSKI

When Bob Dylan calls, other musicians listen. Even when they’re icons and gifted songwriters in their own right.

"I had a nice soft year planned until he phoned and interrupted our lives," says Merle Haggard, who was preparing for his current two-month tour with Dylan when we spoke by phone from his Central California home. "He asked me to go on this tour and I wanted to honor his request, so I’m getting the family together. We like being together, so the whole family — my daughter, my son and my wife, Theresa, who sings in the band — travels when we tour. And I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s records a lot, just to familiarize myself with the great lyrics he’s written. I think it’s gonna be a good match-up."

Next Friday, the Haggards will arrive in Boston for three headlining nights with Dylan and his band, whose members include veteran Hub guitarist Stu Kimball, at the Orpheum Theatre. The 68-year-old Haggard could be a character from a Dylan song; certainly he’s been the soul of the protagonists of his own great numbers like "The Fugitive" and "Mama Tried." He was born in the Great Depression — a hard-luck kid with a wild streak whose exploits in robbery and assault landed him in a series of tougher jails until, in 1958, he earned a two-year stretch in San Quentin for a botched caper. Haggard and his criminal pals, all drunk, had showed up to rob at restaurant at 3 a.m., intending to jimmy the back door and slip off with the cash. The problem was, it was actually 10:30 p.m. and the joint was still open.

Haggard had already tasted performing by then. His singing, in a rich, full-blooded voice with a sweet high end, had so impressed Lefty Frizzell backstage before a Bakersfield show in the early 1950s that the country godfather refused to go on until Haggard was allowed to open that very night. And he’d gigged with his musical and criminal buddy Bob Teague, who also got pinched in the restaurant job. But Haggard was on such an incorrigible path that even while he was in San Quentin, he ran a gambling and bootlegging racket.

Two things turned him around. Johnny Cash brought his road show to the prison, an experience that Haggard has described as a real awakening. And there was a darker source of inspiration. Haggard was sent to isolation when he got busted for being drunk in the penitentiary. There he met Caryl Chessman, who had been convicted of robbery, rape, and kidnapping, which under California law mandated a trip to the gas chamber. Haggard had several conversations with Chessman, and the experience must have been sobering. After being sprung from isolation, he got his GED, joined the prison’s country band, and earned parole.

Then he made music history. Along with Buck Owens, Haggard minted the genre’s Bakersfield Sound. It was hard country — guitar-based music with a splash of Western swing, played for oil, agriculture, and railroad workers in tough honky-tonks where bands were valued for their danceability, volume, and true-sounding stories as well as their ability to survive the many brawls. It was no-nonsense music for no-nonsense folks. And it was beautiful.

Like Johnny Cash, Haggard spun tales of American survivors. His bedrock 1960s and early-’70s hits about Dust Bowl living ("Hungry Eyes"), the sad end of hard lives ("Sing Me Back Home"), the burdens of a criminal record ("Branded Man"), and the human spirit ("I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am") take your heart in their hands right from their first few lines. They also offer a glimpse of what life, ideas, and ideals were like in the middle of the last century, in the midst of the working class, and they’ve not lost a lick of their worth or strength over the decades.

"What I aimed to do was paint a portrait from the past, sometimes my immediate past, in words and music," Haggard explains. "The canvas-covered cabins and things I sang about were things that existed in those days, when times were totally different from now. Each town had character, and there were highways instead of freeways with exit ramps that lead to the exact same things wherever you pull off. There was more character to write about, and I think music had more character. My wife says that nowadays a lot of people are writing about air, and I think she’s right. There’s no truth or substance or creativity in a lot of music. Too much of it’s all about the same thing, which is nuthin.’ "

Of course, Haggard’s own idealism has drawn fire over the years. His 1969 hits "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fightin’ Side of Me" were right-wing diatribes in the context of Vietnam. Although he’s pointed out many times that "Okie," with its anti-marijuana, anti-long-hair, anti-sandals lyrics, is a parody, "The Fightin’ Side of Me" is an over-the-top reflection of his own patriotism. But he’s never been one to toe anybody else’s line. If anything, his politics distill into a kind of personalized version of libertarianism, with a wide humanistic streak. "I have a grandson who’s already received a Purple Heart in Baghdad, and they just put him back to duty," the March Rock & Rap Confidential quotes him as saying. "I just wish George Bush would step back up to the microphone and say, ‘Folks, it’s about oil.’ "

In our conversation, Haggard expresses a belief that the lack of invention and honesty he sees in contemporary music is a reflection of America’s broader cultural disintegration. "We’re fighting for freedom all over the world, and we need to have it here in its very best form, and that includes entertainment. I think the public is going to demand a better quality of entertainment rather than accept what the radio and record companies are giving them. And that will help create a rise in our culture. If we don’t bring ourselves up culturally, we’re gonna destroy ourselves. We need to come up with some answers as to how to keep the planet alive and how to nourish our souls as well, which would help things get better on every level."

Like many of the architects of pure country music, including George Jones and, until his signing to American Recordings and his jump to the alternative-rock audience, Johnny Cash, Haggard has since the early ’80s found little room for his music in country’s tightly formatted radio outlets. He doesn’t seem concerned about that. "I’ve never really listened to country radio much. I don’t really listen to much country music these days. I listen to talk radio, and I have my own record collection." It includes plenty of discs by his first musical hero, Bob Wills, who bequeathed Haggard his fiddle when he died in 1975.

Haggard followed somewhat in Cash’s footsteps, signing with the California-based punk label Epitaph in the late ’90s and releasing 2000’s If I Could Only Fly and 2003’s Roots Volume 1. They received critical acclaim and brought him some younger listeners, but they didn’t have the impact of Cash’s American Recordings and Unchained. Haggard’s latest album, 2004’s Unforgettable, reunites him with his old label, Capitol. More surprising, it’s an album of standards, but not country standards. The disc finds him crooning "As Time Goes By," Hoagy Carmichael’s "Stardust," "You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves You" and the Nat King Cole title track among its dozen tunes.

This isn’t the first time he’s mined the past for material. He’s done albums of Bob Wills numbers and vintage railroad songs. But these classics, first built around smooth voices and pianos, make an odd repertoire for a singer who’s always — wrongly — played down the quality of his voice.

"Maybe I say those things about my singing because I just don’t want to be drinking my own bath water," Haggard offers. "I really enjoy singing. It’s a challenge, especially as I get older. I find it more difficult to sound young — by which I mean, alive. When a person’s sick or older and you call them on the phone, you can hear it in their voice, and I don’t ever want that to peek out in my music. I think singing is about the most healthy thing I do. I’m not much of an athlete. I wind up sitting around most of the time. But you have to breathe good to sing, and if I’m up and hollering on stage for an hour and a half, I feel better. It’s good exercise."

The Haggard/Dylan tour doesn’t just mark a historic union of two American musical legends — it’s something of a 40th-anniversary outing for Haggard and his band the Strangers, who are supporting him with a line-up that includes saxophone, trumpet, fiddle, guitar, steel guitar, piano, bass, and drums. They’re flexible enough to play his oldest hits, like the comedic "Sam Hill," and his Unforgettable version of "Pennies from Heaven." "I think there’s been over 200 different musicians in the group over the years," Haggard says, "but I’ve always been the constant, just keepin’ on, trying to do what I do the best that I can for myself and my family and my fans."

Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan with opener Amos Lee play the Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, April 15 through 17; call (617) 482-0650.