Introduction:
In the world of country music, legendary songs are often credited to a single voice or name. Yet behind many of those enduring melodies stands someone unseen, listening carefully, capturing words before they disappear, and believing deeply in the moment when inspiration arrives. For Merle Haggard, that person was his wife during one of the most productive and emotionally charged periods of his life.
Shortly after their marriage in the late 1960s, Haggard entered what he later described as a “heated period” of songwriting. Creativity seemed effortless, but it was also fragile. Any hint that a song might be forming, and she was there—pad and pen in hand—ready to preserve every word. Haggard would later reflect that without her quiet dedication, songs like Mama Tried or Workin’ Man Blues might never have existed. In 1968 or 1969 alone, they produced six BMI-awarded songs, each carefully written down by her at exactly the right time.
The most personal of all, however, was Today I Started Loving You Again—a song born not in a studio, but in the exhaustion and longing of life on the road. After weeks of touring through Texas, a brief break allowed them to fly home. Standing together at the Los Angeles airport, Haggard realized how little time they had truly shared. Almost casually, he said, “Today I’ll start loving you again.” She immediately recognized the weight of those words and replied, “What an idea for a song.”
Weeks later, after a difficult night performing at Longhorn Ballroom, Haggard found himself alone in a motel room. Sitting on the bed, he grabbed a paper bag, tore it open, and wrote the song in full—an experience he later likened to something out of Roger Miller’s own songwriting lore. When she returned with a hamburger, he sang it to her for the first time.
That song would go on to define much of his songwriting legacy. Haggard often said that when royalty checks arrived, all his other songs combined accounted for half the income—Today I Started Loving You Again made up the other half. He received only 12 percent, having given her a share from the beginning, and later, even more after their divorce.
Though the marriage ended, love did not. They recognized they were not meant to be husband and wife, but they became something just as rare: lifelong friends. His children adored her. Years later, as Alzheimer’s took hold, Haggard visited her one last time. She led him to her room, pointed to a photograph of the two of them behind her bed, and quietly told the others present, “He’s my favorite”—without fully knowing who he was.
In that moment, memory failed, but love did not. And neither did the song.