WAITING FOR A TRAIN
with Merle Haggard & Benford Standley
By Buffalo Benford
While writing my three Chronicle Memoir WAITING FOR A TRAIN telling the story of my twenty years research and writing about the amazing Saga of the legend Jimmie Rodgers, Willie Nelson told me that if I wanted to know more about Jimmie Rodgers I needed to talk to Merle Haggard. Years down the track I meet Merle and while doing some interviews with him on Rodgers, who is known as the Father of Country Music, he asks me if I would help him produce the movie he wanted to make about his life and I am Thunder Struck...that adds another dozen years down the track working with Merle on his proposed biopic that we named SOME OF US FLY. Haggard takes his last bus ride to his swan song at the Fox Theater in Oakland, California, February 13, 2016. I then began the years of organizing all my notes, journals, pictures and film working with Merle on my
Jimmie Rodgers Saga while helping him with the the movie he wanted done on his life. Now here I am with
two tall tales as tall as the highest mountain...
That night he told me "I am going to die on this bus even if it kills me." On the morning of April 6, 2016, his 79th birthday, that wish came true, leaving me with his life story that he wanted told to the world when he died of lung cancer on his Santa Fe Super Chief bus parked on his ranch in Northern California. I went into a depressive shock for the next two years while I dug through many boxes of writings and research, plus thousands of pictures and thousands of hours of video on Jimmie Rodgers and Merle Haggard "in the can." For another year I digitized all the HD video.
Then in the spirit of Gonzo Journalism and to reach the Hunter S. Thompson in me I left the ghost town of Creston, California for LAX and on to an eight hour layover in Panama City, then on to Medellin, Columbia, South America for seven months during Covid-19 to escape the political chatter of the U.S. and the depression from writer's block and waking up each morning on the wrong side of rock bottom in the parallel universe of America. I found the Gonzo in me and wrote a 900-page manuScript on my Saga with Rodgers and Haggard and in remembrance Tom T. Hall's song Faster Horses (The Cowboy and The Poet) I wrote 900- pages on the Saga of Me, Merle and Jimmie with the backstory being the history of Show Business in America.
Back in the US I decided to write a separate volume for my Memoir on my years filming and creating the Jimmie Rodgers Saga film that led me to Merle Haggard and with stories of the incredible times with Les Paul, Willie Nelson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Kris Kristofferson, so many of the greats talking about the singing brakeman. I knew I needed a document to draw off of for the JR Saga documentary series with a storyline and timeline, etc. Also, I am producing a sequel to the JR Saga that is a bio-pic feature and/or series itself. The Memoir I am in the final writing of what itself will be the storyline on the history of Show Business in the USA.
Type your paragraph here.A Prelude
to the Prologue before the Epilogue
as an Interlude before the Apologue
and the difference thereof…
Forgot where I read and/or heard that we are all born in the middle of a story in history
then spend a good part of our life trying to figure out where we came in. Willie Nelson
sez, “My dreams are dreaming me.” and Rodgers has been a possession for I’ve surely
been possessed. His saga is an inspiration, a passion, a direction, a confusing obsession,
for I've thought about and worked on this Saga for damn near all my adult life...maybe
more if you go back to my mother singing Jimmie Rodgers songs since I was a boy in
Oklahoma then for the rest of my life in Texas until I went off to college...
Benford Standley
The JimmieRodgersSaga.com is a multiplatform Saga about the life of the music legend Jimmie Rodgers, where on his plaque at the Country Music Hall of Fame and where he was one of the first inductees along with Hank Williams and Fred Rose it says, "The man that started it all." There is still discussion about where he was born on September 8, 1897. My way of thinking after a few decades of research is that Jimmie was born in Geiger, Alabama and raised in Meridian, Mississippi, and later in this Saga I will write more about these early years of Jimmie Rodgers. A Saga that I have dug up about a very simple man from very humble beginnings, who overcame many tragedies in his life to also wear the title of “The Father of Country Music.” It is the story of a man with a very unstable childhood pursuing a dream of being an entertainer and to have his own tent show and to sing on the radio. It is a story of broken hearts and dreams, including the twin tragedies of death and sickness of his mother and death his first little girl, and so broke he could not even afford her burial, and to lose his first marriage. Ultimately it is the story of being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the emerging technologies of the day to achieve and surpass childhood dreams and success at the same time the nation is roaring towards the Great Drought, The Great Dust Bowl and the Great Depression that gave John Steinbeck something to write about Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie something to sing about and Will Rogers something to write and talk about. Not to mention the many years of the Tuberculosis Epidemic aka Consumption. The deadly bacteria attack the lungs; however, the disease can migrate to other parts of the body and some say "it threatened western civilization.” Jimmie died in 1933 of the dreaded disease after a nine-year battle while on his train to the top of music mountain.