Due to illness, Merle was unable to perform this scheduled performance. The Merle Haggard camp and everyone involved wants to apologize for any inconvenience. The show has been rescheduled for April 25. If ticket holders are unable to attend the rescheduled performance, refunds will be made at the point of purchase.

If the question were asked, “Who forged the genre that is known today as ‘modern country music’?,” only a tiny group of country immortals could step forward to share the spotlight. One, out of that select handful, would be Merle Haggard. Merle wasn’t in the delivery room on the morning country music was born; it simply seems like he was. And you won’t hear anybody refer to him as the father of country music. But many will swear he’s at least its godfather.

In the ever-expanding array of country music stars, hitmakers and idols, Haggard walks in no man’s shadow. Instead, he casts a far-reaching shadow of his own. Rare is the country balladeer that has mastered the idiom at so many different levels as has he.

As a singer, Merle openly admits to “borrowing” the stylings of his idols, Lefty Frizzell, Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers, in his early years, and speaks of such beyond-the-genre influences upon his music as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Still, it’s his own charismatic individuality, along with those rich vocal textures that so well express the heart and soul of Haggard, that has always come shining through.

His accomplishments would lead some to sum him up with a catchall cliché like “legend,” but legends are about the past, about those who are about to be swept off into some dusty corner record bin somewhere. Haggard can’t be pinpointed in the past. And he won’t be found rockin’ and whittlin’ with a shoebox full of yesterday’s memories. His music speaks to country audiences today, while his mind and talents flirt with a new millennium.