THE BATTLE OVER "OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE"

...He may be what observers call “the poet of the common man,” but as Malone points out in Country Music U.S.A., “Haggard’s common man is a middleclass worker who, while sometimes unemployed as in ‘If We Make It Through December,’ works hard, drinks beer, rejects welfare, takes a dim view of reformers, and supports his country right or wrong...

...His songs, Kemp writes, are filled with “blunt honesty, simmering passion, and existential angst that flow like blood, sweat, and tears throughout this prolific catalog...

...These are subjects he knows firsthand: Like the Joads in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the Haggards fled Oklahoma during the Depression to find a better life in California...

...Most liberals at the time agreed that it promoted conservative values and hated it for that reason...

...You don’t have to be a conservative to be a fan of Merle Haggard...

...And he did it in the same in-your-face style as the war protesters...

...The sadness evoked by the song comes from the determination of the father to give his wife and family a better way of life and his ultimate failure—despite his success in putting food on the table—to give his wife the luxuries she quietly longs for in her “hungry eyes...

...Haggard explained to Tom Roland that “the main message in Muskogee was pride, and the patriotism was evident...

...Okie from Muskogee” did have somewhat casual origins...

...What “discrepancies...

...Lawler acknowledges this even as she dismisses the meaning of the liberal assault on “Okie from Muskogee”: “The way the song was embraced by conservatives and rejected by liberals, each of whom took the message literally, overshadows its actual point...

...The prisoner takes full responsibility for his actions and does not blame his misdeeds on anyone but himself...

...I think a lot of our country’s problems boil down to attitude,” Haggard told Music City News in 1982, when the country was going through a recession and Reagan had been in office for a year...

...That is, in part, what the new flush of attention to him demonstrates...

...They are on their feet, berserk, waving flags and stomping and whistling and cheering, joining in on the chorus,” Paul Hemphill wrote in a 1971 article in the Atlantic about the reaction to the number at a concert in Dayton...

...But, on the other hand, if America sits on its rear and says, ‘Hey you’re full of crap,’ then it’s not gonna work for sure...

...Mama tried to raise me better,” the prisoner reflects, “but her pleading I denied...

...The ‘Evening’ was pretty much a flop because the audience had no appreciation for country/ western music and there wasn’t much rapport, except when Haggard did his ‘Okie from Muskogee’ . . . which everybody responded to very favorably, of course...

...In both “Workin’ Man Blues” and “Hungry Eyes,” we sympathize with the characters because they have earned our respect through their virtues of pride and perseverance...

...Haggard does have a gift for writing songs about working people and their struggles to make ends meet...

...But I am saying—and I am attacking—anything that might destroy democracy...

...A quote unearthed by Tom Roland’s Billboard Book of Number One Country Hits puts his views in context...

...Okie from Muskogee” transformed Haggard from a performer of semi-autobiographical country songs about prison into a musical spokesman for the Silent Majority...

...But it is untrue to say, as Rolling Stone’s Kemp does, that these songs are full of “existential angst”—at least not in the way the word “angst” is used today to describe the songs of Nirvana and other whiny musical artists...

...The revisionists don’t even address the conservative sentiments in many other Haggard songs...

...After the counterculture held its summer festival in Woodstock, N.Y., a counter-counterculture movement was launched in the fall through the agency of a song called “Okie from Muskogee,” in which the singer-songwriter Merle Haggard extolled the traditional values held dear in Muskogee, Okla...

...When Haggard was born near Bakersfield in 1937, three years after the move, his family was living in a converted railroad boxcar...

...But while Haggard may view the prisoner with some sympathy, he never tries to make excuses for what he did...

...The Right said it celebrated patriotism...

...the Left said it was about the woes of working-class America...

...Listen to that line: ‘I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.’ Nobody had ever said that before in a song...

...When Haggard and his band were riding in their bus through Oklahoma, someone noticed a road sign giving directions to the town of Muskogee and remarked, “I bet they don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee...

...Paul Hemphill, one of the first writers to try to distance Haggard from his conservatism, lamented in his 1971 Atlantic article that “‘Okie’ and ‘Fightin’ Side’ came along precisely when students and rock musicians were beginning to picture Haggard as a potential Woody Guthrie of the seventies—a raw Populist tale-spinner more concerned with singing honest songs than with cutting gold records—but the two new songs blew it for them...

...And after the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning was constitutionally protected speech, Merle filed a bitter dissent with “Me and Crippled Soldiers”: “For all the wars we fought and won, to keep old glory wavin’/Today they ruled to burn old glory down/And only me and crippled soldiers give a damn...

...Songs like Okie are a comforting musical antidote to student protest, black militancy and serious debate on the war,” lamented Paul Dickson in a 1970 article in the Nation...

...He didn’t mind the protesters “standin’ up for the things they believe in,” he sang, but he issued this stern warning about the limits of his tolerance: “When you’re runnin’ down our country, hoss, you’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me...

...Haggard also told the Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff that “Okie” was a tribute to people like Haggard’s father, who hailed from the Oklahoma town of Checotah, about 20 miles south of Muskogee...

...What I mean by attitude is that if 75 percent of the American public believed in Reagan’s economic plan, it would work...

...The career of Merle Haggard brings to mind a perceptive insight of music journalist Peter Guralnick, who complained of “the tendency . . . to equate political ‘correctness,’ or liberalism, with musical adventurousness...

...If we hadn’t defended our way of living, our American way of life, in the past—well, there wouldn’t be anything to tear up today...

...Haggard has always been a fascinating figure to some members of the counterculture attracted to his early life as a rambler and prisoner...

...Okie from Muskogee,” they say, was intended as a light satire of provincialism, and its audience just didn’t get it...

...After “Okie” was released, Richard Nixon wrote Haggard an appreciative letter and invited him to perform at the White House several times, including on his wife Pat’s birthday...

...In her new book Songs of Life: The Meaning of Country Music, Jennifer Lawler attempts to develop a “new critical perspective” to “show that country music is not for dummies” and “to show the degree of sophistication and intelligence necessary for both writing and understanding country music lyrics...

...For those brief bombastic moments, the majority isn’t silent anymore...

...Haggard has also been compared to John Steinbeck for the vivid images he evokes of the working class and poverty...

...IN AN EFFORT TO CLAIM MERLE HAGGARD AS ONE OF THEIR OWN, CRITICS NOW ARGUE HIS MOST FAMOUS SONG WAS A LIGHT SATIRE OF MIDDLE AMERICA...

...The Left was in the right on this one...

...And in an effort to claim Haggard as one of their own, some of these critics are arguing that Nixon, Reagan, and the song’s fans in middle America missed its deeper meaning...

...In his review of the box set, Rolling Stone’s Mark Kemp showers Haggard with flattering clich?s usually reserved for alternative rock artists...

...IS IT REALLY A CONTRADICTION TO SUPPORT BOTH PATRIOTISM AND TOLERANCE OF INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS...

...The song “started as a joke,” Merle explained to a reporter from the Knoxville NewsSentinel in the 80s, “but it only lasted about three seconds before we realized the importance of it...

...What he respects is a sound conformity to abiding principle and a healthy convention which keeps the knife from our throats...

...But you do have to understand his conservatism to understand the interplay of his music, his lyrics, and his life...

...John Berlau is a policy analyst at Consumer Alert, a Washington-based free-market consumer group...

...Although some of Haggard’s new fans claim he wrote “Fightin’ Side of Me” mostly because he was under pressure from the record company to capitalize on the success of “Okie,” Haggard still stands by the song’s lyrics...

...While the song represents a very conservative point of view, with a speaker who is proud of Muskogee,” she writes, “it is supposed to be a wry and ironic commentary on the nature of these conservative people in this small town who are unthinkingly jingoistic...

...So what is the song’s actual point...

...In the chorus, Haggard sings what has become one of the most famous lines in country music: “I turned 21 in prison doin’ life without parole...

...My father came from the area, worked hard on his farm, was proud of it and got called white trash once he took to the road as an Okie,” he said...

...In this way, if in no other, Haggard fits perfectly the definition of a conservative offered in Russell Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things: “He neither denounces convention and conformity indiscriminately, nor defends every popular fashion of the evanescent hour...

...When he sang “Okie” at concerts, audiences would get almost as excited as the crowd at Woodstock...

...In a 1974 essay in Harper’s, a then-liberal Florence King decried “the love-itorleave-it paranoia exemplified in the tuneful threats issued by Merle Haggard...

...But the “Okie” dispute is unusual in that Haggard’s lyrics are very straightforward, and when the song came out there was little argument about its message...

...In a similar vein, country music historian Bill Malone, a professor of history at Tulane, writes in the liner notes of the Smithsonian Institution’s official collection of country music that “the smashing success of Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’ . . . cast him in the undeserved role of rightwinger” because it “overshadowed his sensitive statements about working class life, such as ‘Mama’s Hungry Eyes.’” Malone, Kemp, and the revisionists all share the conviction that Haggard doesn’t “deserve” to be labeled a right-winger because, after all, who would believe that a right-winger could write songs that are so sensitive to the poor and to victims of prejudice...

...He told Roland: “I’m not saying you can’t stand up and say what you believe in...

...Tonight was the Merle Haggard ‘Evening at the White House,’” reads an entry from H.R...

...Such discrepancies don’t so much point to the disparities in his worldview as they reveal the more complex tug of war going on inside his soul...

...That leaves only me to blame, ’cause Mama tried...

...Recently, Haggard has been the subject of adoring attention from music critics on the occasion of the release of a four-CD box set of his life’s work...

...But did Haggard ever say “Okie” was in jest...

...In “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” the follow-up to “Okie,” he sent an even more direct message to the hippies...

...Haggard and the boys kept shouting lines back and forth about what small-town life must be like in Muskogee without hippies, drugs, and riots, and pretty soon they had the beginnings of a song...

...Many other Haggard songs also celebrate patriotism and the virtues of the straight life...

...During the 1984 presidential campaign, there was an ideological war over the Bruce Springsteen song “Born in the U.S.A...

...Ronald Reagan, then California’s governor, granted a pardon to Haggard in 1972 for the attempted-burglary conviction that sent the Bakersfield native to San Quentin for three years in the late 50s...

...Rolling Stone’s Kemp writes that “for every flag-waving single like ‘Okie’ or ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me,’ Hag threw an impassioned curveball such as ‘Irma Jackson,’ a plea for tolerance of interracial love...

...Similarly, the editors of Country Music magazine describe “Okie” in the 500page Illustrated History of Country Music as “the infamous hippie-baiting song which he claimed to have written as a joke...

...Does Kemp really believe it is a contradiction to support both patriotism and tolerance of interracial relationships...

...Most of the people Haggard writes about do not complain, try to make the best of what they have, and don’t give up easily no matter what life throws at them...

...We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” the song began...

...And we don’t take our trips on LSD/And we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street/But we like living right and being free...

...According to Lawler, most “Okie” fans lacked the sophistication necessary to comprehend Haggard’s deeper meaning...

...He wrote a song as a lark, kind of a gentle joke, and he became the biggest star in country music,” writes Paul Kingsbury, editor of the Journal of Country Music, in the book The Grand Ole Opry History of Country Music...

...The “Okie” album went gold, a rarity in country music in those days, Haggard’s concert fee tripled to $10,000 a night, and he began bringing in $1 million a year in gross income...

...Even writers more sympathetic to country music’s fans assert that “Okie” wasn’t meant to be taken literally...

...Richard Goldstein, in a 1973 issue of Mademoiselle, said, “There is something utterly sinister about the image of Richard Nixon inviting Merle Haggard to sing at the White House...

...The Grateful Dead covered “Mama Tried,” in which the narrator sings of running away from home “on a freight train leavin’ town, not knowin’ where I’m bound...

...In “Workin’ Man Blues,” for instance, a blue-collar worker who has nine children ponders “leaving, . . . throw[ing] my bills out the window [and] catch[ing] a train to another town,” but quickly puts the thought out of his mind when he remembers, “gotta buy my kids a new pair of shoes...

...Some admirers acknowledge that Haggard holds some conservative views but insist his work is fraught with “contradictions...

...The working man also proudly declares his selfreliance when he sings, “I ain’t never been on welfare, that’s one place I won’t be...

...In “I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me,” a prisoner of war in Vietnam proclaims that he’s “still proud to be a part of Uncle Sam” and places the blame for his sad predicament solely on the North Vietnamese...

...The prisoner, like Haggard himself, came “from a family meek and mild” and had a father who died while he was a child...

...Now, strong disagreements about the meaning of song lyrics are nothing new, and this isn’t the first time politics has entered the debate...

...Haldeman’s diary in 1973...

...Haggard is a direct refutation of this belief, because his conservatism has been the source of his musical adventurousness— he has remained an interesting and powerful songwriter because he respects and pays attention to the jazz, blues, and country artists who came before him...

...That’s one of the most important rights we have, and that’s what I’m doing...

...Similarly, “Hungry Eyes,” which Malone and other critics refer to as Haggard’s most sensitive statement about poverty, is moving precisely because the character’s father works so hard to “feed my mama’s hungry eyes” and does not wallow in his angst while working in a labor camp during the Depression...

...In “Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver),” Merle exhorts everyone to “stand up for the flag” and waxes nostalgic about the “politically incorrect” days “when a man could still work and still would” and “a girl could still cook and still would...

...What “tug of war...