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Sam Rockwell is in talks to join the Amazon Studios biopic on of the country and western singer Merle Haggard.

Rockwell is up for the role of Haggard and will do his own singing of Haggard’s standards.

Based on the Haggard memoir ‘Sing Me Back Home’ the film will be set in the 60s’ and will focus heavily on Merle’s complicated love affair with singer Bonnie Owens – his singing partner and eventual wife. It will also focus on his tumultuous rise from an inmate who served three years at San Quentin – where he was among the prisoners who watched the first prison performance of Johnny Cash in a life-changing moment – to the clubs in vBakersfield hometown, to Capitol Records in Los Angeles.

Robbin Bissell will direct and co-write the script with Merle’s widow Theresa Haggard. Bissell and Haggard will also produce.

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Exclusive: Amazon Studios has acquired a package for a film biopic of iconic C&W singer Merle Haggard. Oscar-winning actor Sam Rockwell is circling to play Haggard, and he will do his own singing of Haggard’s standards, recorded during the ‘60s when the picture is set.

Robin Bissell will direct the film, and he will write the script with Merle’s widow, Theresa Haggard, based on the Haggard memoir Sing Me Back Home. Bissell and Haggard will produce the film together.

Pic will be a reunion for Bissell and Rockwell, latter of whom starred with Taraji P. Henson in the 2019 Bissell-directed drama The Best of Enemies, about the face off between civil rights activist Ann Atwater against C.P. Ellis, Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1971 Durham, North Carolina over the issue of school integration.

Haggard had a long and storied career, but the film will focus on...

In March 1973, Merle Haggard and the Strangers released a new single called “The Emptiest Arms in the World,” a boozy, forlorn honky-tonk ballad from the soon-to-be-released I Love Dixie Blues LP. The country song’s lonely main character, however, might well have been positively giddy compared to the actual country’s beleaguered leader. President Richard Nixon was at an all-time high 67% approval rating at the time of his inauguration. But with the Watergate scandal dominating national news, Nixon’s numbers soon went into freefall — and never recovered.

It’s no wonder,...

From the Forties through the mid-Seventies Nashville was staking its claim as Music City, developing the hybrid of country and pop known as the Nashville Sound. At the same time, on the West Coast, the thriving California honky-tonks gave birth to what would be termed the Bakersfield Sound, so named for the town in the southern San Joaquin Valley that would gift country music with two of its most iconic artists: Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. On August 9th, the music that melded honky-tonk twang with rock & roll instrumentation will...

On April 6th, 2016, his 79th birthday, country music icon Merle Haggard died at his home in California’s San Joaquin Valley after a battle with pneumonia. In the three years since his passing, Haggard’s already sizeable legacy continues to inspire country artists and others touched by his image as the “poet of the common man.”

Merle Haggard was one of the chief architects of the Bakersfield Sound, the hugely influential West Coast-based sub-genre of country music. The city’s first recording studio dedicated to country music was Tally Records,...