Merle Haggard

Merle Haggard made his third visit this year to Orange County on Saturday at the Coach House. With almost any other artist, you'd worry about overkill. But so deep and rich is Hag's songbook that he could play once a week for a year without repeating himself. Of course, he did repeat himself in several songs that are fixtures on his latter-day set list.

An Oklahoma hospital in Garth Brooks' hometown must pay $1 million to the country singer because it failed to build a women's health center in honor of his late mother, jurors ruled Tuesday. Jurors ruled that the hospital must return a $500,000 donation to Brooks plus pay him $500,000 in punitive damages in Brooks' breach-of-contract lawsuit against IntegrisCanadian Valley Regional Hospital in Yukon. Brooks said he thought he'd reached a deal in 2005 but sued after learning the hospital wanted to use the money for other construction projects.

Once there was a great tradition in country music of male harmony singing, one that's nearly disappeared in recent decades. The Everly Brothers, the Louvin Brothers and the Monroe Brothers were among the standouts of sibling harmony acts, while Johnnie & Jack and a few others proved conclusively that singers didn't have to be family to sound like they were. That's part of the inspiration behind “Buddy and Jim,” the new collaboration between two of Americana music's most respected singers and songwriters -- and longtime friends-- Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale coming out Tuesday.

Merle Haggard usually personifies the no-nonsense entertainer. He walks on stage with minimal fanfare and simply starts singing some of the greatest country songs ever written. So it was tempting to scour his familiar craggy face for any hints that a stunt double was taking his place Wednesday at the Crazy Horse Steak House.

Before Merle Haggard took the stage at the Greek Theatre, his band played "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes," a salute to country music vets like Haggard, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. It looks as if Randy Travis will be the one to fill Haggard's shoes, but on Friday the genuine article showed that he might be around making valuable music a while longer.

There's a powerful symmetry at work in "Crazy Heart" that's impossible to resist. It's a parallel between protagonist Bad Blake, a country singer whose entire life has led him to a nadir of disintegration, and star Jeff Bridges, whose exceptional film choices have put him at the height of his powers just in time to make Mr. Blake the capstone role of his career. It's a mark of how fine a performance Bridges gives that it succeeds beautifully even though the besotted, bedeviled country singer has been an overly familiar popular culture staple (Rip Torn in "Payday," Robert Duvall in "Tender Mercies," Hank Williams and Merle Haggard in their own lives)

"What do you get when you play a country song backward?" goes the joke. You get your house, your girlfriend, your dog, your job and your truck back. If you follow the logic in that joke, chances are legendary country singer-songwriter-musician Merle Haggard would regain all of the above, along with a squandered youth, several ex-wives and song rights sold to pay the IRS for back taxes. All that with one press of the rewind button.

The Vietnam war was on, and the war of words at home was as bitter as the war of bullets overseas. Social norms and traditional mores were under fire as well. A new word, counterculture , was being coined. And in popular music, as in the polarized American culture from which it sprang, the battle lines were being drawn. Tonight, in a tamer time, lines drawn firm and hard in the '60s will be retraced in Orange County.

Click here to download TV listings for the week of Sept. 23 - 29 in PDF format This week's TV Movies   SERIES Access 360: The Amazon rainforest and its fragile ecosystems are surveyed in the debut installment of this series (6 p.m. National Geographic). XIII: XIII and Jones (Stuart Townsend, Aisha Tyler) travel to Montana in search of Max Serle (Matthew Bennet) on a new episode of the action drama (6 p.m. Reelz). America's Next Top Model: Singer Alicia Keys has a proposition for the contestants in this new episode (8 p.m. KTLA)

RICHARD J. DORSO Talent agent, TV exec, boutique owner Richard J. "Dick" Dorso, 101, whose lengthy Hollywood career ranged from talent agent to television writer and producer to haberdasher, died April 6 at his home in Los Angeles, his family said. The cause was not given. Born in San Francisco in November 1909, Dorso as a talent agent represented such entertainers as Artie Shaw, Judy Holliday, Ethel Merman, Gordon McRae, the Andrews Sisters and Doris Day. When television was overtaking film and becoming the dominant entertainment medium, Dorso was an executive overseeing programming for United Artists Television.