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.

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.