Merle Haggard: Hated the guy. Loved the guy.
I'm talking decades and decades of love for the man responsible for creating the favorite music of my life. It took some doing for me to get there, though.
The greatest country artist to ever come out of California, the pinnacle of the game-changing Bakersfield Sound and -- yes, I'm going there -- the genre's finest songwriter (sorry, Hank), Haggard died Wednesday on his 79th birthday in his Shasta County home.