Merle Haggard was an escape artist.

The future country music legend broke out of juvenile hall and prison 17 times by his own count as a teenager and young man. But his greatest escape was getting out of Oildale, the hardscrabble town in California where he grew up, the son of refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma.

“Oildale is and has been struggling with real poverty, abject poverty. I mean, a lot of the roads aren’t paved,” observes Ethan Hawke , director of the Merle Haggard documentary Highway 99: A Double Album , which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival . “There’s a lot of homeless, a lot of addiction. And you start to see that this guy pulled himself out of there without any help. He’s incarcerated from 14 to 23, grew up with virtually no education. I’m not ta

See Full Page