During the final two weeks of 2001, liveDaily is looking back by revisiting several notable artist interviews that we've published throughout the year. The following interview first ran on Oct. 5.

After more than 40 years of writing and recording music, Merle Haggard [ tickets ] still felt nervous before he called guitarist Norman Stevens. He wanted to know if Stevens would play alongside him on a tribute to the legendary honky-tonk singer Lefty Frizzell, one of Haggard's major influences.

Fortunately, Stevens--Frizzell's former guitarist--agreed to participate, and the fertile seeds for what became the 12-song album "Roots, Volume 1" (Anti) were planted.

Haggard took the title "Roots" seriously, recording in his living room and positioning players in the same places Frizzell's sidemen were stationed when many of the songs were first cut. The album includes material written by Frizzell, Hank Williams and Hank Thompson, plus three of Haggard's own.

LiveDaily recently caught up with Haggard to talk about the new album, which celebrates what he calls "music that I played before I had music of my own."

I read that you found Norman Stevens through an ad. Was he looking for people to play with? What paper?

Well, it was an ad he placed. He wanted to give lessons to people that played swing. The ad was in the Redding, Calif., paper and he lived in Cottonwood, which is about 15 miles south of where I live.

Had you been friends with him before?

Norm Stevens was a hero of mine that I'd never met. He lived here beside me for 40 years and I didn't know it. I think I wish I'd met him 15 years ago, and we could have done [this album] then, because my voice was younger and it's hard to sound like you're 20 years old when you're 64. I gave myself about a seven on [the new album]. I might have got a higher score if it had been earlier in my life.

I've read where you said that Stevens was one of your three biggest influences. What aspects of his style did you incorporate into your own playing?

His guitar playing was influential to me on those records that he played with Lefty, because Lefty was so overpoweringly the reason why I started this. He was the one who put the fire in my life. So here was this guitar player that was also there doing the right thing. Roy Nichols--and myself and James Burton and a whole bunch of guitar players that have played on my records previous to this particular period--all learned from Norm Stevens.

You recorded the album in your living room. How did you have to reconfigure your living room to make it ready for recording an album?

That was another situation that seemed to fall into place like everything just came together--like some sort of thing you'd watch on television. Like a script was written. The house was just perfect for recording. We just moved out of our other house because of a mold problem right in the middle of the Christmas holidays; we had to uproot and move my entire family to an old house we were fixin' to sell. As it turned out, this house has a configuration that I happened to notice when I first walked into it. I said, "You know, I bet this thing would really sound good." So we made a record here. We recorded about 23 sides of the same type of thing, paying tribute to a body of music that I played before I had music of my own.

What about this group of songs made you want to record at home, as opposed to using your own studio?

I didn't want the studio. The first thing we did was mark off the method of recording. When we started to make [a tribute] record to Lefty, we knew we had to do it without any help. There's no way to sound like Lefty sounded unless you play it straight, without any gauges or limiters or echo chambers or anything that affected reality. Lefty didn't need them. The same with Hank Williams and Hank Thompson--they didn't use things like that when they recorded in 1950. They just learned enough technology that they didn't interfere with reality. Now you're hearing music. You suppose you could get those new kids off in a room with a guitar and they'd sound like they do on the record?

What was it like to look across the room and see one of the guys who helped shape your style playing along with you?

I can't believe it. I've had that moment many times in the last year, since last December. I feel like it's an ongoing blessing.

Are you still getting together with Norm Stevens and playing?

Yeah, he's sitting there reading the paper right now.

You wrote three songs for the album, "Tender Heart," "More Than My Old Guitar" and "Runaway Mama." How challenging was it to write songs that can stand alongside what have become country standards?

It's a quick elimination process. They either stand up or they don't. And I got lucky on a couple of them.

You've been really prolific the last couple of years. To what factors do you attribute that?

Well, I'm like a guy that jumped out of an airplane. It's close to the ground, I gotta get something done. We have the next project that I'm not permitted to say anything about. We got so much going on our plate, we're trying to keep our minds focused on what we were doing here.