Mr. Haggard was born in Bakersfield and grew up in Oildale, the tracks a formative experience of his youth. Patricia Puskarich, who lived next door in a vacation trailer, one without indoor plumbing, recalled young Merle teaching her how to put pennies on the rails to flatten them, a prime form of pre-television childhood entertainment, she said.

Boxcar houses were not uncommon during the Depression, as chronicled by Works Project Administration photographers like Arthur Rothstein. The story of how the Haggards acquired theirs offers a glimpse of the era’s widespread prejudice toward Okies, though the singer’s own pride in his origins would later inspire his 1969 hit, “Okie From Muskogee.”

The family learned of the boxcar from a fellow church member, who asked James Haggard if he thought he could turn a surplus refrigerated train car she owned into a home, Mrs. Rea recalled. “She asked my daddy where he was from, and when he said ‘Oklahoma,’ she said, ‘I hear Oklahomans don’t work.’ Well, his blue eyes met her blue eyes, and he said, ‘I’ve never heard of one who didn’t.’ ”

Though the house was intended to be temporary, the remodeling was a family effort: James Haggard added a pop-out dining area, a wash house and a hand-poured concrete bathtub and front steps; his wife, Flossie, planted fruit trees, climbing roses and a backyard grape arbor, drying raisins for pies on the roof.

Life changed irreparably when James Haggard died suddenly of a stroke when Merle was 9. What the singer would later describe as his checkered past — the juvenile delinquency, the incarcerations, the five marriages and bankruptcy — began at 11 when he hopped his first freight train with a buddy.

“He wasn’t a bad kid,” explained his sister, who cannot bring herself to listen to her brother’s songs because of the difficult memories they evoke. “The poor child was just in pain. He was looking for his own answers and couldn’t find them.”

The boxcar’s trajectory from ruffled-curtain coziness to a ramshackle dwelling with bars on the windows is not an anomaly in Oildale, an unincorporated community with pockets of Hooverville-like poverty and methamphetamine use. Although there are new middle-class subdivisions in Oildale, low rents in some neighborhoods have drawn a transient population, and it has three times the number of registered sex offenders found in downtown Bakersfield, according to state Megan’s Law data.