Whipped Cream Difficulties

Preservationists are raising money to buy, restore and move the boxcar to the Kern County Museum in nearby Bakersfield, which is just under a two-hour drive from Los Angeles.

You may be wondering why this boxcar is so important to preservationists. After all, aren’t there plenty of boxcars in the world?

Yes. But this isn’t just any boxcar: this is Merle Haggard’s childhood home.

Though the house was intended to be temporary, the remodeling was a family effort: James Haggard added a pop-out dining area, a wash house and a hand-poured concrete bathtub and front steps; his wife, Flossie, planted fruit trees, climbing roses and a backyard grape arbor, drying raisins for pies on the roof.

I wanted to drop some Haggard into this post, but I had a lot of trouble finding a performance of “Rainbow Stew” or “Fighting Side of Me” on YouTube that allowed embedding. So how about this: Merle Haggard in 1978 on “Austin City Limits”.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 28th, 2014 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Clippings, Museums, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.