Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee: languages, bodies, and ecologies [1st ed] 9781501321436, 9781501321443, 9781501321450, 1501321439, 1501321447, 1501321455, 9781501321467, 1501321463

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OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.comand our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Peepshow by Samantha Bennett In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony Transformer by Ezra Furman Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson The Holy Bible by David Evans Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin and many more…

Okie from Muskogee

Rachel Lee Rubin

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Copyright © Rachel Lee Rubin, 2018 Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2143-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2144-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-2145-0 1

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Okie from Muskogee: Recorded “Live” in Muskogee, Oklahoma — Merle Haggard

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Hag as Historian The Bakersfield Sound: Hag gets Hard Singing a Group Autobiography: Hag as Hero Misreading “Okie”: Hag Gets Hit Country Music and Labor: Hag’s Two Hands Good-bye, Merle: Hag Heads Home

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Sources Permissions

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the people in my life who have had to listen to me talk about Merle Haggard for years (and, in the case of my kids, for their whole lives): Akrobatik, David Hershey-Webb, Geoffrey Jacques, Jeffrey Melnick, Dave Palmater, Susannah Ringel, Jacob Rubin, Jessie Rubin, Larry Rubin, Jim Smethurst, Judy Smith, and Cindy Weisbart. I am also grateful—and want to call attention—to the magnificent Vietnam on Record discography, compiled by Hugo Keesing, Wouter Keesing, C. L. Yarbrough, and Justin Brummer. And I apologize for any awkward verbiage I have used to describe songs; permission to quote them is expensive.

Introduction: Hag as Historian

Soon in the morning I shall rise To hammer a new song Out of these old pieces! — Don West “Someone Told My Story in a Song” — song by Merle Haggard On New Year’s Day in 1958, Johnny Cash accomplished what would lead to perhaps the iconic moment of his musical career: he performed for a group of inmates in San Quentin Prison. This was Cash’s first prison concert, and it donated a lot to the figure of the Man in Black. The association with prisons would, before long, revive a flagging career. It would also inject into that career a certain bad-assery that would before long be captured in a recording of one of Cash’s future prison concerts (in 1968) in the form of the rowdy cheer that erupts when Cash sings, about murdering a man (a cheer later revealed to have been added post-production)

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in the song “Folsom Prison Blues.”1 From that one song— that one line—an industry of t-shirts and posters emerged, as well as a crossover fandom among audiences who were especially keen to claim Cash following his exaggeratedly dark American recordings.2 But when the concert in San Quentin was over, Cash left the prison with his crew. Most have forgotten (or never knew) that there was a man sitting in the audience who could not leave—an aspiring musician incarcerated there who in fact did have the “prison blues” Cash sang so insolently and regularly about. Twenty-year-old Merle Haggard had been convicted of burglary and attempting to escape from jail that same year, and was serving out what would be a two-year prison term. While Cash would go on to win over a broad audience with his brooding demeanor and deadpan delivery, Haggard, on the other hand, born five years after Cash and consistently acknowledged as one of the very greatest country vocalists, songwriters, and instrumentalists by traditional country audiences, is still frequently seen outside It should have been obvious that the prisoners were careful not to cheer at such lines, because they feared repercussions from the guards. 2  Cash himself recorded a song that made fun of this reputation by chronicling a time he was arrested—for getting high and picking flowers in a woman’s yard in Starkville, Mississippi (“Starkville City Jail”). Cash never spent more than a night in jail. Meanwhile, journalist Paul Hemphill reported after a fellowship at Harvard, “The kids on Harvard Square believed without question that Cash had done time at Folsom Prison for crimes ranging up to murder, and that his album recorded live from Folsom was the purest of Artist-Saying-What-He-Knows, and they became irritated when advised it wasn’t necessarily so” (93–94). 1 

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of that world as an unappealing conservative “redneck.” “Merle Haggard sauntered through life with a working-class chip on his shoulder,” sneers Jan Reid in The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (12). Despite being weighed down by this “chip” (or accusations like Reid’s about having that chip), Haggard wrote and recorded hundreds of songs on more than seventy albums (not counting compilations), has a songbook of great variety and scope, collaborated with many other musicians, had a huge number of hits, and experimented with musical forms. So why has the visitor to the prison been given so much cachet, while the prisoner himself is considered tacky? Sharp examples abound. A gimmicky notebook called “Music Listography” features a drawing of a brooding Johnny Cash wearing a prison number around his neck. On an online discussion board (“My Les Paul”), someone hastily and efficiently writes, “For the record, I hate ‘Okie from Muskogee’. . . . On the other hand, I love ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’” A commenter on a reddit thread called “Let’s Talk Music” insists that he hates country but loves Cash because of his “sincerity and ‘real-ness.’” The fact that this “realness” included contempt for what Cash derisively called “hippahs” and occasional disturbingly jingoistic patriotism (such as a history of spying for the US government and a song he introduces by expressing gratitude for the Second Amendment so he can shoot anyone who messes with the American flag) doesn’t enter into it with Cash—just with Haggard.3 Cash did get some pushback from countercultural activists who saw him as a sell-out for doing commercials for huge oil companies starting in 1972. He didn’t stop making the commercials, though. 3 

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In fact, one of the most useful reasons to take a close look at Haggard is that he reminds us that the music is defined as much by haters as lovers, and that in order to understand how music works, we need to look at anti-fandom as well as fandom. Haggard’s most famous song, “Okie from Muskogee,” is an excellent case study of this. The song—a bit noveltyish, a bit of a joke—could easily have faded after its moment along the lines of “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” (1960) or “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” (1972). Instead, conversations swirled around “Okie from Muskogee” for decades. Strikingly, these conversations transformed a small portion of the live show recorded for Okie from Muskogee, the album on which “Okie” appears, into a haiku for the rest of Haggard’s career: the moment when Haggard, performing in Muskogee, is presented with a key to the city. A door, in other words, is opened to him because of the song. But as I will discuss below, just as many doors are quickly locked in that moment. Why, we must ask, have so many critics and audience members stayed on the surface, failing to go any deeper into Haggard’s work than his most famous and famously misread song? Why have misreadings of “Okie” persisted against rather concrete evidence that mounts only with the decades? The prominent music critic Robert Christgau, for instance, refers condescendingly to “Okie” as Haggard’s “patriotic chore.”4 On the more academic side, the generally brilliant “Patriotic chore” was a phrase used to describe actual military service; Christgau’s use of it also invokes a few country songs, perhaps most famously “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” recorded by Kenny Rogers 4 

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cultural historian George Lipsitz lazily refers to “Okie” as a “countersubversive classic” (62). Christgau, Lipsitz, and a plethora of others bring to mind all the Southern jokers who seem so humble and simpleminded until the person they’ve encountered walks triumphantly away and slowly starts to wonder if he has been somehow made a fool of. How far to Little Rock indeed, gentlemen. In order to understand “Okie,” therefore, we need to move beyond our personal opinions and take the profound question of reception into account. Who found the song useful, and how? What were people claiming—about fandom, class, region, educational level, culture, and more— by saying, “I love ‘Okie from Muskogee’” or “I hate ‘Okie from Muskogee’”? Indeed, both responses are already loaded by the use of the term “Okie,” which began as a negative way to refer to Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma. With occasional, appropriate stylistic adoption of Haggard’s youthful “riding the rails,” this book takes up the album on which Haggard first released his most famous, most chided, and most misread song, 1969’s Okie from Muskogee: Recorded “Live” in Muskogee, Oklahoma. “Okie from Muskogee” closes out the album, to the audible delight of the audience. In this track Haggard satirically positions himself as a proud Okie, presumably poking fun at hippies while indicating in multiple and the First Edition in 1969, the year “Okie” came out. The song’s narrator makes it clear that he didn’t start the war, but was proud to go and do his part. Haggard himself uses the term in an alternate version of “They’re Tearing the Labor Camps Down,” explicitly connecting military service to class position.

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ways the slyness of this approach. According to the liner notes, the crowd insisted that Haggard sing “Okie” more than once. There is clearly a fluid triangle of approaches that need to be taken into consideration in order to understand the meaning of Haggard’s best-known song. First, of course, is the reception of the song; it was a track that thrilled some audiences (at the Muskogee show but also among musical acts associated with the very counterculture invoked in the song) and horrified others (who, missing the joke, accused Haggard of being antihippie). Second is the song’s location as the final track on the album and the various ways the album carefully works to tip the artist’s hand and lay the groundwork for “Okie”—through the songs that lead up to “Okie,” through the text and album art, through the sophisticated instrumentation that counters the construction of a simpleminded “Okie”—revealing much about Haggard’s musical ambitions and personal values. And finally, the song itself—every word, every reference, every guitar solo—is jam-packed with instructions from Haggard for how to listen. The conversation swirling around and within “Okie” carries profound historical weight, and there is more to learn by paying attention to that conversation than to the song itself—about class, about regionalism, about who looks down on whom and what that means. *** Okie from Muskogee was Haggard’s first live album. It was recorded in the Muskogee Civic Center on October 10, 1969, and released the same month. The album quickly topped the country charts, reaching number 1 in less than a month after its release, and entered the top 50 of the pop charts. For the 6

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titular song, Haggard won Top Male Vocalist and Single of the Year. On the album the audience is heard cheering “Okie from Muskogee” more enthusiastically than any other song on the record—important evidence of not only how well the song was received but also how this enthusiasm was carefully and strategically presented, as the recording, of course, was engineered and edited. When the Oklahoma governor presented Haggard with the key to the city, he declared that Haggard was an honorary Okie. But this was not necessary: Haggard was born in 1937 in Bakersfield, California, in a converted boxcar where his parents had settled after having left DustBowl Oklahoma  for agricultural work in California—a trajectory Haggard took up in some of his most moving and autobiographical songs. Receiving the “honor,” he is heard on the album gently saying, “Well, I’ve been called one most all my life,” efficiently reminding the audience of the difference between when a term is used from within a group and from without—and of the class implications of any invocation of the term. Indeed, the eloquent analysis in some of Haggard’s autobiographical songs could be said to identify Haggard as a sort of home-grown class theorist. “Hungry Eyes,” for instance, recorded the same year as “Okie,” sums up with remarkable exactitude the class basis of American society: “Another class of people/kept us somewhere just below/One more reason for my Mama’s hungry eyes.” In a 1972 song, “They’re Tearing the Labor Camps Down,” Haggard sings about the differences he notices in the basics of working-class life when he returns from prison to his old stomping grounds. “Oh, they’re tearin’ the labor camps down,” he sings—then 7

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moving on to capture a central impulse of modern country music with breathtaking poeticism and efficiency: “I feel a little sentimental shame/Where’s a hungry man gonna live at in this town?” “Sentimental shame”: that phrase alone— longing for the past, humiliation over the past—does the work of a half-dozen books about country music! It also directly counters the view of the “noble worker” who would feel only proud of what he does, and never exploited—a stance that remained central to Haggard’s lyrics and is effectively presented in his 1990 song “In My Next Life,” in which a farmer who has lost the family farm (a considerable cultural focus in the 1980s) tells his wife that in his next life, he will be noble and heroic. The conclusion, of course, is that he can’t. The arc sketched out by Okie from Muskogee: Recorded “Live”—from hearing Cash in prison in 1958 to singing “Okie” onstage a decade later, from being locked in to being handed a key, from Oklahoma to California and back to Oklahoma—is a helluva freight-train ride through various histories: personal, musical, geographical, ethnographic. As Okie from Muskogee followed seven studio records, many of the songs on the album had already been hits for Haggard. Yet the work they did on their own does not close off the work they did as a group, carefully chosen for a moment in Haggard’s career in which he was crafting an artistic identity through performance. The eyes and ears that were on him far exceeded the literal audience in that Muskogee auditorium. This attention was in no small part because Haggard was one of the country musicians most responsible for an innovative trope that would come to reshape the genre: the country musician as what I like to 8

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call an “ethnic hero,” doing cultural work similar to the work done by novels about immigrants, vaudeville performances, and racially and ethnically determined fandom of boxing matches, to name a few examples. Okie from Muskogee was released one year before Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter; both albums (and title songs) were crafted and received by the post-migration generation as an iconic statement of identity that strategically pulls the past into the present. Listening to Okie from Muskogee provides an arresting account of how Haggard, then thirty-one, was in the process of shaping a powerful persona. The previous generation of country music was not especially autobiographical in presentation, and was rarely structured as a first-person narrator telling a broadly applicable story about her or his life. Unsurprisingly, the great exception was Haggard’s musical hero Jimmie Rodgers, known as the Singing Brakeman, who not only had worked as a brakeman but would also write a number of songs about dying of tuberculosis. It is no accident, then, that a cover of one of Rodgers’s songs, “No Hard Times,” was early in the concert set that formed Okie from Muskogee. But from the beginning of the album to its standing-ovation end, Haggard is carefully telling us who he is and who his people are: what it means, in other words, to be an Okie who is not in Oklahoma. About half of the songs on Okie from Muskogee: Recorded “Live” are about some kind of travel—driving trucks, jumping trains, looking bleakly after a plane that has taken off with a lover on board. Indeed, the very first line of the album’s very first song, “Mama Tried,” recalls the narrator’s 9

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first memory: hearing a train whistle and longing to ride that train someday. This is a fairly accurate summary of Haggard’s early professional self-presentation, which also included a whole lot of album art picturing trains or cars. In fact, naming his backup band “the Strangers” implies a certain kind of transience, because travel renders the traveler continually unknown to others. But we must also acknowledge that Haggard, through the band’s name, is quite sharply saying to audiences, “You don’t know me. You’ve likely got it wrong.” This becomes acute on Okie from Muskogee, where there are approximately as many songs about travel as there are about prison or the law (with the obvious “I’m-on-the-run” overlap). Side A’s “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” in fact, was Haggard’s first number 1 hit. As Haggard’s propensity for travel songs indicates, he was practically born in transit. A recent PBS special showed Haggard returning to the converted boxcar in which he was born, with the documentarian lamenting that it had not been converted once again, this time into a historical monument to its famous early resident. A boxcar would truly be a fitting monument to Haggard. And the reason he was born in one supplies another reason Haggard had, as he sang in 1977 on his twenty-fifth studio album, Ramblin’ Fever: his parents were representatives of the story told by John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath, by Woody Guthrie in “The Great Dust Storm” and “Dust Bowl Refugee” (among other Depression-era Dust Bowl ballads), by writer Ken Kesey and musician Chris Hillman and poet Wilma McDaniel. Hag’s parents arrived in California as Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma two years before Merle, the youngest of 10

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three children, was born. It is central to Haggard’s artistic vision that migrancy and imprisonment—both so strongly associated with his early artistic success—are indelibly tied to class position and labor. Haggard’s artistic output instructs us about this connection as well. On the Okie album is one of Haggard’s most well-known work songs, “Workin’ Man Blues.” But dozens of work songs are scattered generously throughout his career, including an entirely sympathetic song, “Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp” (1968), written from the point of view of a man whose mother turned to prostitution in order to feed her fourteen children. Here, Haggard is covering a song that was previously a hit for African American country singer (and Count Basie vocalist) O. C. Smith in 1968 and written by songwriter Dallas Frazier—born in Oklahoma, raised in Bakersfield. Of course, the power dynamics of the American recording industry have always been shaped by structural racism, from its early insistence on creating separate categories of “race” music (for all black musicians) and “hillbilly” music (for all white musicians). But the musical dialogue between Haggard and Smith—a white cover of a black contribution to a genre that the racist recording industry worked in its earliest days to shove black musicians out of—demonstrates that class can form lines of solidarity across racial and geographical lines. Such solidarity is invoked nowhere more clearly than in the titles of two songs by African American country singer Stoney Edwards: “Poor Folks Stick Together” (1970) and “Hank and Lefty Raised My Country Soul” (1973). Fascinatingly, another Count Basie

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vocalist—Arthur Prysock—would record a song of Haggard’s on his own 1969 album, The Country Side of Arthur Prysock. Haggard’s linked artistic concerns of migrancy and imprisonment are both located in his own past. He was first sent to juvie when he was thirteen, and he first ran away from home (freight-hopping and hitchhiking) when he was fourteen. Following that early introduction to law enforcement, Haggard was in and out of detention centers, in and out of Bakersfield, and in and out of various underpaid menial jobs: digging ditches, forking hay, shooting oil wells, flipping burgers, driving a truck. After chunks of time in juvie and jail, Haggard was finally sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison for attempting to rob a restaurant that, as it turned out, wasn’t yet closed. (Haggard was, not surprisingly, intoxicated at the time.) He spent his twenty-first birthday in solitary, a few cells down from convicted kidnapper and rapist—and anti-death penalty activist—Caryl Chessman. In his autobiography, Haggard offers sharp commentary on those prison days. “Being behind bars was almost becoming a way of life,” he notes. “I didn’t like it, but I didn’t like life on the outside either” (Haggard, Sing 136). Haggard had played the guitar since his older brother gave him one as a present when he was twelve, but he always pointed to the moment in San Quentin when he saw Johnny Cash perform as when he really set his mind to be a professional musician. And Cash would go on to have an even larger influence on Haggard’s musical persona, ultimately convincing him that he should let people know about his past incarceration. At the beginning of his career, Haggard had kept his past of incarceration under wraps. 12

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This would change due to a rather awkward (and alcoholpowered) exchange with Cash that Haggard recounted in his 1981 memoir: He leaned over, pulled up a straw from the flask, and sucked up the wine. As he walked over to the wash basin, he focused as best he could in my general direction. “Don’t I know you from someplace?” he asked. “I’m on the show,” I said. “Oh, I know that, Merle,” he said laughing, “and I know who you are. It’s just that I’ve got this strangest feelin’ this ain’t the first time we’ve met. I just can’t remember where . . . ” “I don’t think you’d remember,” I said. “But I do.” “Where was it then, San Quentin?” He started to laugh and then stopped. He realized his joke hadn’t been a joke after all. “My God,” he said then, totally embarrassed. “It was San Quentin, wasn’t it?” I nodded . . . He just kept on apologizing for what a terrible thing it was to say . . . “Here,” he said, fumbling in his pocket with a wet hand. “Maybe this’ll help.” He offered me a double-dot dexie. I took it. (Haggard, Sing 229–230) Later, Cash would convince Haggard to recreate this dialogue in a cleaner and stagier way (no double-dot dexie!) when Haggard was a guest on Johnny Cash’s TV show. The word about the prisoner-turned-musician was out, and, as Haggard commented in Rolling Stone after Johnny Cash died 13

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in 2003, “He was right—it set a fire under me that hadn’t been there before” (Diehl). His San Quentin “eureka” moment notwithstanding, Haggard did not model his music after Cash’s. His sound had always been audibly Californian—as the brightly guitardriven “Okie from Muskogee” illustrates as well as any of his other songs. The influence of Buck Owens, whose band Haggard very briefly joined in 1966, and of other Bakersfield country innovators, such as Wynn Stewart and Tommy Collins, is actively present in Haggard’s early recordings, from his very earliest studio albums Strangers (1965) and Swingin’ Doors (1966). Likewise present is the influence of Texas Swing innovators Spade Cooley, also born into a Dust Bowl family, and Bob Wills, who played regularly in Bakersfield during his musical heyday. Then, with that influence in the back pocket of the jeans he wears on his album covers (no tuxedo, ever), Haggard came into his own, and changed up the Bakersfield game.

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The Bakersfield Sound: Hag Gets Hard The night spots in Bakersfield might well be called the “redneck, scared-to-death, honky-tonk, skull orchard, barely-making-a-living places of Okie entertainment.” —Tommy Collins “Drink Up and Be Somebody” —Song by Merle Haggard Haggard entered the musical world at the moment when country music, centered in Nashville, was being smoothed out and classed up in what came to be known in the 1950s as the “Nashville Sound.” This was a moment birthed by movement—around the country and around the globe. Between the 1920s and 1940s, rural black and white Southerners had moved to cities in droves in what came to be called the Great Migration. As a result, post-migration country music was transitioning from a regional form to a national form. For many, this development sparked a desire in the next generation of those participating in the music—creating it and listening to it for sure, but also marketing it—not to be

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ridiculed and looked down upon by their new neighbors, as their parents had been upon their arrival. There were attempts at making country music respectable at all levels of the industry. A succinct and wonderful history of this transformation is told through the album covers of Eddy Arnold, whose clothing becomes more and more formal, until he is wearing tuxedos and silk scarves. Another clear illustration is Dick Bruning’s 1970 album The Smooth Country Style of Dick Bruning. The most important word here is “smooth”—and on the album cover, Bruning is wearing a gold jacket and a pinky ring. And the nickname of one of the Nashville Sound’s central figures, “Gentleman” Jim Reeves (whose music began charting in the 1950s and continued charting after his death in 1964), alone speaks volumes. The career arc of musician and promoter Roy Acuff is an eloquent post-migration history lesson for the gigglers among us. In an early musical iteration, he recorded rather risqué songs, singing, for example, a particularly rude version of the delightfully vulgar Appalachian folksong “Bang Away Lulu” in 1936 (as “When Lulu’s Gone”). Acuff was participating in a broad and well-established smutty tradition of early country, with similar songs recorded by the likes of Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, Chris Carlisle, and Jimmie Davis (who went on to become the governor of Louisiana). Davis would ultimately be remembered as the one behind “You Are My Sunshine,” but his musical career started with songs like “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues” (1932), which introduces a rooster and contains lines about cocks and pussies. Acuff would also abandon this approach of early country music, publically disapproving of any kind of rowdy behavior, 16

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including street culture. Invoking real estate’s longstanding emphasis on “location, location, location,” Nashville’s most iconic country music venue, the Grand Ole Opry, moved in 1969 to a quiet, professional neighborhood—a move Acuff vocally supported, as the scholar Jeremy Hill has fascinatingly laid out in Country Music Comes to Town. This move marked the “cleaning up” of Nashville country on multiple levels. The Opry began as a radio show, and then turned into a weekly country music concert and the center of the country music industry. For our purposes, its complex relationship with a familiar vision of country music fans and producers as lowbrow is eloquently captured in one word of its name: “Opry.” That word efficiently raises a number of questions about the reception of country music: Was it being elevated or mocked by being put in dialogue with opera? Are country fans and musicians too lowbrow to understand opera—or even pronounce it right? Is it an in-joke acknowledging how country is viewed from outside? Does the word “Opry” equate country music stages with elaborate opera halls? But when the Grand Ole Opry became part of an effort to clean up country, another layer of meaning was added to the genre. Journalist Paul Hemphill nails both the motivation and the musical product of these changes with remarkable efficiency, invoking the moment as “when Ray Price sings in front of a dozen violins (not fiddles, please)” (330). The Nashville country scene, in other words, had become classy. The Bakersfield scene Haggard entered, in contrast, was hard—prompting Nicholas Dawidoff to say that the singing of Bakersfield innovator Buck Owens sounded like “a broken beer bottle” as opposed to Nashville’s music, which was 17

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“cosseted” with strings and soft harmonies (230). What came to be known as the Bakersfield Sound emerged in California in the mid- to late-1950s and peaked in the mid- to late1960s, when Haggard came into his own. Musicians in the Bakersfield scene were turning away from the polished, lush, polite arrangements being released in Nashville, where musicians were wearing suits and ties, smoothing out their voices and their accents, and performing with choral backup singing and string sections or even full orchestras. Nashville country marked an attempt to sanitize an earlier tradition of country music and perform classiness not just for country music fans but also for new city neighbors who had long been instructed to think of them as trashy. The Bakersfield Sound instead manifested a strong jazz influence, roaring vocals, a prominent beat, and central use of the steel guitar. Rose Maddox, a Bakersfield innovator, commented that the Bakersfield Sound was “altogether different” from the Nashville sound. “It’s not trying to be so . . . professional,” she remarked (Bakersfield Country!) The many live performance venues in Bakersfield were rough honky-tonks, gathering places for displaced “Okies” after long days of underpaid physical labor. Looking back on one of the most important of those clubs, the Blackboard, Buck Owens mused, “There might have been one fight a week, but to hear people talk about it, it was such a den of iniquity” (Ray). It’s hard to tell whether “only” one fight a week was a joke or not, but either way, Owens—and the “people” he mentions as talking down the place—do not describe the birthplaces of the Bakersfield Sound as decorous venues in keeping with the Grand Ole Opry. Returning as 18

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he often did to the question of work, Owens went on to say of the Blackboard, “It was the only place where I could earn a living from music.” He further elevated the broad importance of the clubs by noting that in those days, he was incredibly proud that he could live in Bakersfield and make it in country music; to him, this felt like he was “thumbing his nose” at the Nashville power structures. Haggard, for his part, fondly referred to the Bakersfield clubs—the Blackboard, but also the Lucky Spot, the Green Door, the Hitchin’ Post, and others—as “the epitome of redneck honky-tonks,” and Glen Campbell called them “fightin’ and dancin’ clubs” (Hempill 328). A practical reality of these rowdy clubs, whether the fighting was indeed only once a week or not, was that the venues were louder, the audience was louder, and therefore, the music was by necessity louder—a shaping process parallel to the post–Second World War blues going electric in Chicago. It is here that amplified music boomed, so to speak, in the country music world. We are no longer talking about frontporch music or polite audiences in an auditorium, or even a sound-proof radio station; Owens, for example, went electric before Bob Dylan did. Further cranking up the volume, Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby had made important changes to the design of electric instruments in this postwar moment. And the instruments weren’t just louder: there were considerably more of them. Buck Owens’s 1964 recording of “Close Up the Honky Tonks,” for example, uses three guitars, drums, bass, and steel guitar; five years later he had added synthesizer, organ, piano, electric harpsichord, and electric guitar.

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As the sound of country music changed, so did its mainstream visibility. Before the Dust Bowl and the wartime industry–related influx of formerly rural dwellers into urban areas, interest in what was still called “hillbilly” (not “country”) music in California was minimal. It was still a regional form and generally one to be looked down upon, as the use of a slur (“hillbilly” was far from a neutral term) to define and market the music immediately indicates. Upper-class “song-catchers,” who traveled south to collect “pure” folk songs and ballads, worked hard to differentiate their supposedly more worthwhile mission from anything involving “hillbilly” music. In fact, acknowledging both the lack of interest in “hillbilly” music and the elevation of “songcatching,” a Los Angeles radio station came up with a truly bizarre strategy in 1930 to introduce the form to its Southern California listeners at a moment when network radio, having just been introduced in 1928, was itself quite new. The station’s managers figured they could hook in listeners by pretending to “discover” a “hillbilly” band living in the hills near Los Angeles. The Beverly Hill Billies were presented as actual mountain folk from near Beverly Hills, and their popularity grew as many musicians cycled through the act. Then, in a perfect distillation of country music’s impetus and historical path, the hillbillies left the station in 1932 and were replaced by a group called Zeke and His City Fellers. Perhaps this was an acknowledgment that the initial joke (which apparently many listeners took as reality, hard as that is to believe now) about hillbillies in Beverly Hills was no longer necessary, as the migration of actual rural people to California had begun. 20

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Still, a slide from “hillbillies” into city dwellers—that is a fabulous country music snapshot! Then, both the Beverly Hill Billies and Zeke and His City Fellers charged into Haggard’s moment in the form of the comic The Beverly Hillbillies television show, which began airing in 1962. Unlike the Dust Bowl and defense industry migrants, these TV ’billies came to California because they had money, not because they needed money, though they didn’t really learn how to live like a rich person—never changing the way they dressed, for example. (A similar attempt to figure out what it means if a working-class Southerner somehow becomes rich is located in how often, over the years, Elvis Presley’s mansion Graceland is described as “gaudy.”) But the musical link was not lost: bluegrass innovators Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt sang the show’s theme song. Scruggs is credited with developing the modern syncopated, metallic “threefinger roll” style of banjo playing—moving away from the Appalachian clawhammer style and presenting another rich encapsulation of country music’s urbanization. The 1993 film version of the TV show would add another layer of historical signification through the inclusion of Lily Tomlin, whose father was, in fact, an Appalachian who’d moved north to the city for a factory job. The decades following the Beverly Hill Billies radio show saw the development of network radio, and country music radio shows sprang up all over. In 1947 alone, 650 shows used live “hillbilly” performers. In the early commercial years of country music, such shows were broadcast only early in the morning, because of a supposition that only early-rising farmers would listen. Now, they were broadcast at more 21

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advantageous times. The Bakersfield moment, therefore, manifested an elimination of distance—a shift from the notion of country as an alien music for farmers to a new reality, in which people in the cities were in contact with the makers of the country sound. We can measure this change by studying changes in the Grand Ole Opry, the radio show that would come to function as stand-in for the whole country music industry when it was transformed into the genre’s most iconic venue. The Opry was founded in 1925, an early entry in the “barn dance” radio format. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Opry was no longer a localized barn dance, but was now a national program featuring “star” talent. Its ambiance changed markedly with its audience—people from all over the United States and Canada began gathering outside the Ryman Auditorium, where it was broadcast. In addition to these changes in country music radio, the development of Haggard’s musical scene was spurred by the end of wartime rationing of shellac. This allowed California to host and develop its own record labels, as small labels were temporarily able to produce the same number of recordings as large ones. One of these rising labels was Capitol, which was founded in 1942 by songwriter Johnny Mercer and quickly skyrocketed to one of the “big six” in the postwar period. Capitol’s first number 1 hit was Ella Mae Morse’s “Cow Cow Boogie,” a humorous (and historically relevant) song about a cowboy in the city who tells his cattle that they need to become hip. Capitol would soon score a string of cowboy hits by movie star Tex Ritter, and would ultimately sign Haggard. But before signing to Capitol, Haggard had recorded on Tally, a new California label established by Fuzzy Owen (who 22

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would become Haggard’s manager) and his cousin Lewis Talley. Another new California-based independent label, 4 Star, which was founded the year the Second World War ended, conducted all of its business—auditioning, signing contracts, recording, pressing, marketing—in a warehouse in Pasadena. For the vinyl nerds among us, it is worth noting that 4 Star left its real mark by becoming one of the first labels to use semivinylite instead of shellac for its records, as shellac was in short supply because of the war. This move was very significant to establishing the dominance of longplaying albums in the marketplace. In expanding the audience for West Coast country music, these new West Coast labels were soon joined by a spate of influential California country music–themed television shows in the 1950s: Town Hall Party, Melody Ranch, California Hayride, and Hometown Jamboree, to name a few. Guitar virtuoso Joe Maphis, who frequently performed on these shows, commented that they were the reason he always had plenty of performance opportunities—though he would refer to those shows as “assembly-line television,” directly connecting the new “citified” country sound with the jobs that pulled the rural community out of the country in the first place (Kienzle). With sharp, if painful, insight, Maphis went on to note that the audience for these television shows included devoted wealthy viewers who, despite watching the show in the privacy of their homes, nonetheless mocked the likes of him in public. Those seemingly contradictory forms of interaction—mocking and fandom—came together in Haggard’s moment in the most famous country music TV show, Hee Haw, which was hosted by Buck Owens and 23

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Roy Clark. The show was well known for participating in country-fool stereotypes and for launching important musical careers. Hee Haw ran on CBS from 1969 to 1971 and was then syndicated for two decades. The new articulations of a booming recording industry, the growing significance of amplified instrumentation, and the centrality of television shows all indicate how technology, not provinciality, was pivotal to the musical scene to which young Haggard aspired. Another striking difference between West Coast country and the Nashville sound was that West Coast country was audibly blacker, manifesting a strong influence of jazz and blues. In fact, the earliest country songs of the post-migration Okie world—during a time when Haggard would fudge the question of his age and/or probation status in order to enter bars—swing, bop, and roar far more than they weep. Jimmy Patton’s frantically fastpaced “Oakie’s in the Pokie” (1958) is a truly fierce rockabilly number. Jack Guthrie (Woody’s cousin) recorded a rockin’ version of “Oakie Boogie” (1946), a song that would go on to be covered by many California-based artists. Doye O’Dell’s 1948 “Dear Oakie,” which details how tough it’s going to be digging oil wells in California, is basically just squawking trumpets, slapping piano, and boogie-woogie. (Do yourself a favor: listen to O’Dell’s version of “Oakies in California” from 1949—it contains the rudest horns ever.) That same year, Capitol A&R man Cliffie Stone and His Barn Dance Band recorded “He’s a Real Gone Okie,” a swinging threeline blues song, and Merl Lindsay and his Oklahoma Nite Riders fantasized jazzily about a “Lonesome Okie Goin’ Home.” West Coast country music was also rougher in 24

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subject matter as well as sound. Arkie Shibley’s 1950 “I’m a Poor Oakie” narrates the Dust Bowl migration in the voice of a man trying to move his broke, hungry family west; the song also invokes the country talking–blues style of Okie chronicler Woody Guthrie.1 And Spade Cooley, whose catalog contains multiple songs with “Oklahoma” in the title, sang “All Aboard for Oklahoma” (1947), a fantasy about getting a California “Okie” back home, before Cooley was sent to prison for brutally murdering his wife in front of their teenage daughter. This squawking, rude, loud, “hard” Okie sound barreled into Haggard’s moment. The year Okie from Muskogee: Recorded “Live” in Muskogee came out, Texan Hank Thompson released a whole album of Okie-related songs, Hank Thompson Salutes Oklahoma. The album includes a number called “Homesick, Lonesome, Hillbilly Okie,” which tells of a man who has left Oklahoma to work in a factory where, though he works forty hours a week, he just barely gets by. The sounds of California surf music also found their way into “Okie” numbers; particularly delightful examples are the Country Boys’ “The Okie Surfer” from 1964 and the 1970 hit by the Hagers (who first gained notice on the television show Hee Haw), “Gotta Get to Oklahoma (’Cause California’s Gettin’ to Me).” The latter, like much of the California music of its moment, mentions gurus and The song also invokes the fiddle tune “The 8th of January,” which would become the basis for one of the biggest national country hits, Johnny Horton’s version of “Battle of New Orleans”—written by another Arkansas native. 1 

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meditation, but in this case they are followed, amusingly and strategically, by a prominent (country-invoking) steel guitar line. And the hippie-country-rock band Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen added their verse to the Okie saga in 1975, with their quite poignant “California Okie,” which functions like a concise history of Haggard’s world: cotton fields, Bakersfield, hitchhiking, drooping pride, fear of law enforcement. This swinging influence is strikingly audible in Haggard’s sound—and his own statements of his artistic priorities. Gerald Haslan, an elementary school classmate of Haggard’s in the town of Oildale and an important chronicler of Bakersfield country, points out that Haggard has always called his own music “country jazz.” In a 1969 interview, Haggard identifies his influence as Fats Domino, Jimmy Reed, and Ray Charles, before going on to add Jimmie Rodgers, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Williams Sr. (Foster 16). A decade later, in the pages of Down Beat—the influential jazz magazine founded in 1934—Haggard calls himself a “30s and 40s jazz freak” (Schneckloth 18). A particularly beautiful example of these rich influences on Haggard’s music is his 1976 song “Am I Standing in Your Way,” which is organized around a horn section and a great deal of melisma. But there is plenty of influence audible on the Okie album as well: bent notes, syncopated rhythm, a classic three-line blues song. The blues number was written by Jimmie Rodgers, who recorded songs in collaboration with a stunning array of musicians, including jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, blues singer and guitarist Clifford “Grandpappy” Gibson, and Lani McIntyre’s Hawaiians, the 26

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group largely responsible for introducing the steel guitar—a Hawaiian instrument—into country music. In fact, it is undeniable that some of the scornful reactions to Haggard’s aesthetic priorities indicate anxiety at precisely this mixing, an anxiety repeatedly captured in a lack of engagement with the complexities of Haggard’s musical style. For instance, quite counter-factually, a New York Times reporter referred in 1978 to the “smoothly polished product of the Nashville sound studios . . . It involved precious little empathy and even less subtlety and was typified blatantly by ‘Okie from Muskogee’” (Reinart SM6). It would take more than one hand to tick off the errors or deliberate misreadings here: Haggard did not record in a Nashville studio, nor was ever signed to a Nashville-based label. His songs were not known for being smoothly polished—in fact, Bakersfield country was known for scorning that polish. (David Lowery of Cracker introduces a solo in the band’s song “King of Bakersfield” by instructing, “Play it weird, man—this ain’t Nashville!”) And as for empathy, the very year the Times piece came out, Haggard had released a song condemning the treatment of undocumented Mexican workers and the theft of land from indigenous Americans. Two years earlier, he had written “Here Comes the Freedom Train,” which salutes Martin Luther King Jr. The Maddox Brothers and Rose are a great early example of the rough-hewn building blocks of West Coast country, which Rose Maddox defined as having more “get up and go” than the Nashville country music referred to in the Times. The Maddoxes were originally from Alabama, and rode the rails and hitchhiked with their sharecropper families to California 27

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as children. In their music, they used bangin’ rhythms. They made rude jokes. They hollered. They audibly placed themselves in the rough “Okies in California” tradition— but tried to be sharper and cheekier in every possible way. An enjoyable example is the band’s 1959 cover of Woody Guthrie’s rib-the-rich-guys “Philadelphia Lawyer,” a song that ends by dryly noting that after a Reno cowboy overhears a fancy East Coast lawyer trying to convince the cowboy’s lover to leave him, the number of Philadelphia lawyers is reduced by one. The Maddoxes’ version adds the sound of a gunshot, followed by momentary silence.2 (Haggard would cover “Philadelphia Lawyer” in 1970, on a live album titled The Fightin’ Side of Me that was recorded, as it happens, in Philadelphia. Who is he fighting with? Fancy lawyers and their ilk, perhaps?) The raucous history of the Bakersfield Sound was structured by the fact that Bakersfield was quite changed by the influx of Dust Bowl refugees and war industry workers. At the beginning of this migration, Bakersfield was small Woody Guthrie was very influential in country music, although this influence is inexplicably downplayed outside of country music’s listeners. In a review of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 and Other Odd Jobs, for instance, Robert Christgau expresses shock that Parton includes a Guthrie song (“Deportees”). Yet by then, there were already many country covers of Guthrie. The Maddox Brothers and Rose performed and recorded multiple Guthrie songs, and were joined by Gene Autry, Flatt and Scruggs, Glen Campbell, and the Carter Family, to name a few with an eye to stylistic range. The covers continued after Parton as well, including a version of “Deportees” by the Highwaymen in which Johnny Rodriguez sings in Spanish. And Guthrie had a popular country radio show in California on KFVD. 2 

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and generally overlooked by people outside the city. Postmigration, though, it soon transformed into an agricultural center, a transportation and shipping hub, and a cultural center. The oil industry, having stepped up production to meet wartime needs, was booming. Truck drivers (such as the one Haggard describes in the half-proud, half-exploited persona of “White Line Fever” on the Okie album) hauled produce and cotton out of the town, often while listening to country music and thereby carrying new musical styles in and out of the city. The huge numbers of rural Southerners who moved to California to work in wartime industries (known as “defense Okies”) also brought their music with them—which would then be markedly changed by its new context and its interactions with other populations. And the migrant lives of many of the agricultural workers likewise created a culture that morphed and traveled as they followed the crops. Buck Owens, who was born on a Texas farm and then moved with his family to do agricultural work in California, captures the way in which farm labor was an artistically productive microcosm of these new cultural interactions: The Mexicans would be picking cotton over here, and they’d be singing, that great Mexican harmony that they sang. Over here the here the blacks would be singing, and they sang mostly blues and gospel songs, and you know, you hear all that, and here you are, a kid looking at all that. (Bakersfield Country!) Owens’s high, sharp harmonies, reminiscent of conjunto music, make it clear that he was doing more than just 29

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“looking at all that”: he was paying close, admiring attention and soon would fold these influences into his own music. He would also address musically the scorn faced by these workers. Owens captures both of these, the cultural mixing and the attendant scorn, in “Streets of Bakersfield.” He first recorded the song solo in 1973, and then as a duet with Dwight Yoakam in 1988 with prominent accordion by the legendary tejano musician Flaco Jimenez. The song’s narrator talks about all the traveling he has done. Then, the chorus of this song goes simple and deep, declaring directly to the listeners that they do not know—and nonetheless do not like—the song’s narrator.3 Haggard points out a similar exposure to a range of musical traditions—but while Owens refers to cotton fields, Haggard notes instead to his time in prison. In his 1999 autobiography, he recalls the practice of “music hour” in San Quentin State Prison and notes that many of his fellow convicts wanted to be musicians. During that hour, Haggard recounts, “you could hear saxophones, guitars, banjos . . . along with several instruments I couldn’t define” (Haggard, Sing 126). This experience would be one of the reasons Haggard brought horns into his musical arrangements. Check out the strategic, wonderful, dirty honking at the end of his 1990 “Bar in Bakersfield,” a song that tells the story— both musically and lyrically—of a new musical sound. David Allan Coe, similarly, recorded a song by Steve Goodman and John Prine titled “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” which he refers to as “the perfect country and Western song”—a reminder of how dead-serious humor is. 3 

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Haggard’s jazz orientation would lead to his being the first country musician on the cover of Down Beat in 1980; the accompanying article introduces him as “a country jazz messiah” (Schneckloth 16). Owens’s field songs and Haggard’s prison songs reveal that cultural mixing, particularly among groups of people frequently deemed undesirable, played a central role in the crafting of the Bakersfield Sound—a dimension that cannot be separated from some of the scorn Haggard came to face in certain quarters. And as a result, the role of music as a survival tactic and collective voice for those low on the social hierarchy is captured in both Owens’s cotton field memories and Haggard’s prison memories. In a particularly moving invocation of music as a collective voice in bleak times, Haggard recalled that inmates with transistor radios had a practice of tuning all of them to the same station and cranking the volume—so that everyone could hear (Haggard, Sing 132). The other significant musicians of the Bakersfield Sound shared this background of migration and interaction that produced Haggard and Owens, who would ultimately become its biggest stars. For instance, Cal Smith—appropriately most known for his 1974 hit “Country Bumpkin”—was the child of Depression-era migrants from Oklahoma. Wynn Stewart, one of Haggard’s greatest influences, was the child of a migrant sharecropping family. Jean Shepherd, a pioneering figure for women in country music, was born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, but grew up near Bakersfield. Dallas Frazier, whose song “California Cottonfields” would be covered by Haggard and who would become a significant country songwriter, was born in Spiro, Oklahoma, and raised in 31

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Bakersfield. Ferlin Husky grew up on a farm in Missouri but found his way to Bakersfield. Like the promise of jobs in fields and factories, the establishment of the Bakersfield musical economy itself became another westward pull. Once the children of Dust Bowl migrants had gifted California with a new sound and scene, many additional musicians traveled west to take part. Virtually all the Texas-based bands (including Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys) moved to California to record and perform. Even musicians who did not live in California frequently toured there; regular performers in Bakersfield clubs included George Jones (one of the greatest American vocalists ever), Ernest Tubb, and Johnny Cash. Musicians also came to the state to be guests on the various country music television shows. And the movie industry also contributed to the casting of California as a country music center. In particular, during this period, the Western underwent a dramatic rebirth, with country singers such as Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, and Spade Cooley appearing in dozens of films. In a strikingly American twist, Spade Cooley was part Cherokee and was educated at an Indian school in Colorado—but in the movies, he was often a stand-in for Roy Rogers. Haggard’s live Okie album is a marvelous case study of the various Bakersfield country innovations, even leaving aside all the lyrics about travel and work and the frequent invocations of the city itself. A guitar on the album’s first song, “Mama Tried,” swoops into the instrumental introduction, with a metallic, modern, and squawking self-declaration. Haggard hollers during the show, especially after “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.” He dramatically bends notes, especially 32

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on “Hobo Bill.” And he mentions places that invoke the new musical scene, collapsing sound and music with the notion of a new home on both a literal and a figurative level in “Swingin’ Doors.” Haggard’s hardness (lovely as it is) is thrown into sharp relief by his invitation to his bass player, Gene Price, to sing a song he wrote called “In the Arms of Love.” In fact, it is difficult to tell whether Haggard was being kind or cruel with that invitation. Price’s singing, while pretty, comes across as bland compared to Haggard’s performance; it is much more evocative of Nashville-centered vocalists along the lines of “Gentleman” Jim Reeves, known for combining country with elements of pop music, and Charley Pride, the highly successful African American country singer, probably under more pressure than the average Nashville singer to be polite and tame. The contrast is sharpened by the fact that Haggard follows up with “Workin’ Man Blues”—summoning in the name of the song a form of music associated with African Americans and born out of field hollers. The storytelling on this album would lead, as we all know, into an insistence that the working stiffs Haggard invited into the auditorium in several ways might have had a new and thriving country music scene—but this country scene was dusted by the simultaneous development of the 1960s counterculture. But for those actually active in the Bakersfield scene, it didn’t work this way. Dwight Yoakam noted that the Bakersfield scene was actually not that separated from the countercultural scene. “I’ve got a poster of Buck Owens performing at the Fillmore West! in 1968 in Haight Ashbury” he declared. “What went on there led to there being a musical 33

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incarnation called country rock. I don’t know if there would have been a John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival had there not been the California country music that’s come to be known as the ‘Bakersfield Sound’” (Trost 31). (Creedence, of course, tipped their hat multiple times to the Bakersfield Sound, for instance, referring to Buck Owens in “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” [1970]. And John Fogerty, recording post-Creedence as the Blue Ridge Rangers, covered Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” in 1973.) Folk-country singer Kathy Mattea embodies this closeness between Bakersfield and the counterculture in her 1991 song “Harley” about a little boy born in Bakersfield to motorcycleriding, cross-country–traveling hippies. At one point, the sidecar the baby is riding in becomes detached from the motorcycle, and the parents don’t notice until they are too far away to know what happened to the baby. A farming couple finds and raises him, with the result that he has two sets of parents: a pair of hippies and a pair of California Okies. But that genealogical work is really an icing on the cake. After all, the guitar alone on “Okie” (we miss you, Roy Nichols) identifies what the post-migration Bakersfield Sound was all about: forward-looking music, backwardlooking story.

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Singing a Group Autobiography: Hag as Hero Well, Okie use’ ta mean you’re from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son of a bitch. Okie means you’re scum. —John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” —Song by Merle Haggard Haggard came of age in the postwar period and quickly established himself not only as a musical star, but also as a teacher and a sophisticated historical guide. He didn’t just record albums for people to listen to at home: on an intellectual level; he built the home for them to listen in. One of the greatest lessons, in fact, of Haggard’s successful musical innovations is that popular music is useful. It is a profoundly significant collective processing site. Haggard performed this educational function in a variety of ways. He pointed listeners back to his musical ancestors in tribute albums that ranged from My Farewell to Elvis (1977) to Two Old Friends (1999), an album almost entirely consisting of songs by Oklahoma-born shape-note gospel  composer

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Albert Brumley.1 He crafted teacherly albums on which he narrates what he sees as important about each song before he sings it, such as 1972’s Let Me Tell You about a Song. He seeded albums with little history lessons, such as 1971’s The Land of Many Churches. He recorded concept albums, such as Songs for the Mama That Tried (1981), a gospel album (the title of which invokes the title of the song that opens the Okie album). Haggard, in short, didn’t just ride the rails, he was a conductor. Not surprisingly, Haggard’s theorizing of country music regularly confronted the enormous national population shifts that produced the Bakersfield Sound. The various migrations undertaken in the mid-twentieth century by rural residents (black, white, and Mexicans in the American government’s bring-’em-over-and-dump-’em-back-when we’re-done-using-’em bracero program)—from country to city, from farm to factory, as part of the army in the Second World War—required them to leave behind a familiar culture and a relatively homogeneous group of people, and live and work beside a much more diverse population. Because of this, the country musician began to play a new role in the postwar period: that of a lionized group representative and first-person narrator. This new role was captured in the introduction of Haggard and his band before the live show that produced Okie. Carlton Haney, promoter and booking agent, tells the

This album was recorded in collaboration with Brumley’s son, Albert Brumley Jr. 1 

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audience that Haggard “has written most of his life into the songs that he sings.” The band then launches into “Mama Tried,” a prison song Haggard released in 1968 that does indeed invoke Haggard’s time in San Quentin—but is also a clear exaggeration of it. The song’s narrator is serving a life sentence for murder, while the real Haggard served just under three years for attempted robbery. But “Mama Tried” would be invoked for the duration of Haggard’s career— by fans, by reviewers, by interviewers, and eventually by academic writers—as the moment when he turned to the autobiographical. Haggard sang a number of powerful firstperson songs that frequently do invoke his own past, but more in a literary sense than a literal one: “Ramblin’ Fever” (from 1977, about being on the move), “Branded Man” and “The Fugitive” (both from 1967 and both of which connect being on the move to social ostracization), “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” (from 1968, and which employs the artistic strategy of addressing scorn about a group by describing scorn about an individual), to name a few. The lesson here is that the accuracy of this claim of autobiographical authenticity really doesn’t matter. What matters is why Haggard’s fans found it useful to gather around a new star who was supposedly telling his own story—why they resonated so strongly with the personal elements and presentation of “Mama Tried” when they knew, of course, that Haggard was not serving a life sentence. The first-person songs written and performed by Haggard (and others) had begun to do the important work of crafting a group identity in the face of a new kind of cultural mixing in a sharply different location—a steel guitar version of the ethnic 37

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literature written by Jews, Italians, and other immigrants in the early twentieth century, introducing characters who are immigrants (or children of immigrants) and who must confront and adapt to their new surroundings. It is because of this resemblance in the use to which the music of Haggard and his contemporaries was put that I like to think of the post–Second World War country singers as “new ethnic heroes.” A relatively early interview of Haggard by Alice Foster, herself an important recording artist under the name Alice Gerrard, grapples with this application of first-person songs; Foster muses that Haggard’s songs are “not necessarily autobiographical, but they are the byproducts of . . . a strong . . . feeling of identity” (Foster 16). Foster is groping for a way to describe a moment when songs became much more rooted in the past as a concept, and much more focused on narratives of a proud and comforting (and, as often as not, invented) history in the face of a life that has been definitively changed. In other words, Haggard and his contemporaries do not want to create an aural museum. Their sound is different. Their art is new. But they are using this art to be the ones who get to decide how to tell their own past. This is visible in the gorgeous cover of Haggard’s 1976 album The Roots of My Raising. On the front of the cover, Haggard is pictured wearing perhaps the sharpest shirt in history, having just stepped out of a sleek car. But on the back of the cover, instead of the car there’s a picture of a plow. No one’s using it. No one is even near it. This album art makes clear which generation is in need of the “ethnic heroes.” It’s not the generation that grew up in Oklahoma and came to California in search of work—not 38

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always, anyway. Their identity as Oklahomans remained pretty solid, even when they lived somewhere else. It’s their children, who either were born in California or spent significant parts of their childhood there, who are in need of a group representative. They are being constantly reminded that they are not really Californians. But as the urban clothing and abandoned plow indicate, they are not really Oklahomans, Texans, or Arkansans either. “Country Music Has Gone to Town,” declared the title and opening line of a song recorded by Porter Wagoner in 1965, a mere four years before “Okie.” Wagoner goes on to joke about how Old Joe Clark—the titular character of a widely performed and recorded fiddle tune from Kentucky about a mountaineer who was murdered in the 1880s—is now wearing an academic robe. Wagoner is using this vision of an educated Old Joe Clark to describe (quite efficiently) a moment that is the birth of modern country music. But modern country music is not only born in this moment; it quickly began chronicling it. A striking number of country songs recount the trip from farms to city life and factory work. In Bobby Bare’s “Streets of Baltimore” (1966) the narrator sells his farm and relocates to get a factory job in Baltimore. In Bare’s “Detroit City” (1963), the narrator sings, “By day I make the cars/by night I make the bars,” thereby stunningly summing up in two lines much of the modern country music impulse.2 Dolly Parton’s “Back Home” (1973) Arkansas-born singer Dallas Wayne brilliantly carried this dynamic forward in a lyric about what happens “as tears and tires roll.” There are plenty of other examples of this poetic summary. 2 

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presents a historical fantasy about a man who moved north for a factory job, and disliked it so much he returned to the rural South. Haggard’s own “Sidewalks of Chicago” (1971) tells the story of a man whose family in Harlan County, the site of one of the most famous coal mining strikes in the country, think he has hit the big time in the urban north— because they don’t know that the address he has given them is actually for a mission home. And those examples all portray literal confrontations of finding the new and losing the old. But art, of course, is not only literal. To understand this dynamic, we have to fold in here songs along the lines of Bakersfield innovator Wynn Stewart’s 1963 “Big City” (not to be confused with Haggard’s song with the same name), in which a man who describes himself through his rural roots accuses the city of having robbed him of what mattered the most. On the surface, this loss is of a lover. But on a metaphorical level, the song functions as an invitation to confront a range of realities about the meaning of city life, including what it meant to be from the rural South or Southwest now that the sense of place, or the familiar connection to land or region, was disrupted. Haggard’s generation of country music starts from a recognition that a way of life has ended. While the genre does frequently make reference to a rural life, it is in this context: baby, it’s over. The music’s cultural work has to do with not only recognizing that a way of life has ended, but also pondering what to make of the fact. Country music did not dwell on the past to glorify days gone by, but instead to grapple actively with the complexities of how the past can 40

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(and does) inform a construction of the present. A song recorded by Bobby Bare in 1980 and then by the popular country group Alabama recorded in 1988 efficiently captures this focus on the move from the farm to the city. The song is titled “Song of the South.” But the verses focus on a disadvantaged family, and the refrain continually reminds listeners that none of the former rural residents are looking back at their previous way of life.3 Along the same lines, Dolly Parton, in her brilliant “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” sings that nothing could take away her memories of the rural life—and nothing could make her return to it, either. Not surprisingly, Haggard was the first to record the song; his splendid version in 1968 was followed by Parton’s own recording in 1969. Haggard also recorded in 1971 a version of a song called “California Cottonfields,” which opens with the narrator recalling being a tiny child in his mother’s arms—a familiar nostalgic trope—and quickly moves into a very bleak description of leaving a ravaged Oklahoma farm for California that becomes even bleaker when the family reaches its destination. Haggard’s musical catalogue is packed with songs that emphasize, both topically and sonically, the migration from rural to urban (and indicate as firmly as Alabama did that there is indeed no going back). On Okie from Muskogee alone, eight songs out of fourteen are about being on the move. In This song is fascinating in its political invocations as well. For instance, the narrator points out that his father was a Democrat and a veteran, noting dryly that rich men did not vote the way he did. It also mentions that after the 1929 crash, his father worked for the TVA. 3 

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these songs, being on the move is presented as compulsory, whether that compulsion is external (“I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Branded Man”) or internal (“Mama Tried,” “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” “White Line Fever”). Even more dramatically, the inclusion on the album of an important country subgenre—the execution song—functions as a strong indication that while going back can under certain circumstances be a comforting fantasy, it can’t be more than a fantasy. The past is presented as literally dead, and nostalgia as a (perhaps useful) trick. Haggard, not coincidentally, recorded several execution songs and authored the one on the Okie album, “Sing Me Back Home.” Haggard’s vocal strategies deftly underscore the relationship between not being able to go home physically and the use of music to go home symbolically: the prisoner about to be executed in the song requests hearing his friend play guitar just before his execution. The vocal harmony on the song comes in on the phrase “sing me back home,” making that part of the story collective, and the pronunciation of the word “guitar” alone, with stress on the first syllable, functions as a class and regional identification. Strikingly, a later version of the song ends with a horn solo, invoking Haggard’s memories of hearing the instrument while he was in prison. Both “Sing Me Back Home” and another execution song Haggard recorded, “Green, Green Grass of Home” (1968), introduce a prisoner fantasizing about returning to the site of his childhood until execution gets in the way. The songs turn this inability to return home into a final punch in the gut. For instance, in “Green, Green Grass of Home,” the narrator joyfully describes returning to the town of his childhood, 42

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seeing the house where he grew up, the places he used to play, his parents, his girlfriend, and so forth. And then it drops: the warden shows up to take him to the electric chair, and he will return home only symbolically, after his death. This imagined homecoming in the form of the narrator’s burial site, strikingly, is not presented musically—Haggard stops singing, and talks the final verse. Haggard’s fellow Okie-inCalifornia musician Cal Smith makes this prison/homesick metaphor explicit in his prison song “Oklahoma” (1968), in which a convict wishes he could return to where he lived in his youth. He knows that he never can. This strategic “pulling out the rug” stuck in country music, and in the last couple of decades re-formulated from the execution song to what I like to call at home the “three-verse country sucker-punch”: a song that repeats its chorus, but with an evolving context that sharply changes the meaning of the repeated lines. The third and last time the chorus comes around, it’s quite painful, frequently moving to loss or death.4 Haggard completed the prison time that he refers to in “Mama Tried” with an intensified resolution to become a professional musician. Upon his release, he got breaks from established musicians, for instance, performing as part of Buck Owens’s band, the Buckaroos. But the title song of Haggard’s third album, I’m a Lonesome Fugitive (released in Songs that follow this format include Crystal Shawanda’s “You Can Let Go Now, Daddy,” Patty Loveless’s “How Can I Help You to Say Good-Bye,” Sawyer Brown’s “The Walk,” Kenny Chesney’s “There Goes My Life,” Ashley Gearing’s “Five More Minutes,” and Darius Rucker’s “It Won’t Be Like This for Long.” 4 

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1966), marked a distinct uptick in his treatment of his own past in his music—his first studio album, by comparison, consisted only of generic heartbreak songs—and was his first number 1 hit. On the album cover, Haggard is pictured hanging onto the iconic country travel symbol, the train. This is one of several of Haggard’s albums invoking the figure of Jimmie Rodgers, country music’s first national star who was known as “the Singing Brakeman”—and one of a handful of his albums with trains pictured on the cover. But Haggard, who frequently “rode the rails” as a very young teenager, is also invoking his own life here, something country music began to do broadly after the “ethnic hero” function kicked off. For instance, Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (recorded in 1969—the same year as “Okie”) reached number 1 on the charts and became Lynn’s signature song, sealing the role of the singer’s life as part of the performance. The role of “ethnic hero” was not needed in country music when it was a regional form, emerging from a much more homogeneous environment. Now, however, musicians in the city began consciously doing the work of representing a listening base—in both complex senses of “represent”: to depict and to stand for. No American musical genre had been as devoted to autobiography before the post–Second World War generation came of age, and no genre elevated it quite as high until hip-hop came into the picture, similarly filling the need to tell the history of a group of people mostly either derided or mocked. (There are, by the way, a number of striking parallels between country and hip-hop, including the reliance of both on masterful wordplay—fascinating, given that they are each produced by groups of people long 44

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ridiculed for their allegedly sub-par speech. And the Geto Boys’ brilliant “Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” [1999] quite effectively mocks people who take gangsta rap too literally, the way some took “Okie.”) “Sing Me Back Home,” then—which Haggard performed on the Okie album as part of a medley—becomes rather layered. After the release of I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, Haggard’s role as an autobiographical hero soared. His songs increasingly took up the interconnections among a new generation’s California-Okie identity, the cultural mainstream, social contempt, and country music itself. Two songs in 1976 alone, “No More Trains to Ride” and “So Long Train Whistle,” invoke and combine travel, music, class position, and generational differences. Haggard received critical pushback for this oppositional move for the rest of his career. Contempt for country music and defending the social hierarchy went hand in hand, a connection that was summed up with breathtaking elegance by Waylon Jennings. Wryly (and profoundly) in his 1978 song “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand,” Jennings suggests that the reason he is persecuted by those in power is that he sings through his nose—a style identified with country music. As Jennings indicates, the question of self-identification is far from neutral for the chief producers and consumers of the country. After all, the official industry name for the first commercial country recordings, “hillbilly,” is a contemptuous term, the origin of which remains the subject of speculation, but which certainly originated from and during a quite calculated smashing of traditional Appalachian selfsufficiency that brought mountain people into confrontation 45

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with city culture. Ernest Tubb, the country music pioneer whose record My Hillbilly Baby has the warning on the back, “When you call me hillbilly, just smile,” is largely credited with initiating the move to change the genre’s name to something less humiliating. Despite the change from “hillbilly” to “country,” the idea of “hillbilly” long remained present in country music, even during moments of crossover success. For instance, the Boston Globe mused in 1992 that despite the current country crossover boom, consumers in Boston have not responded to the likes of Garth Brooks and Clint Black because Bostonians are, essentially, too sophisticated. The article concludes with the advice that things might be different if only musicians would leave the hayseed, the bib overalls, and the cowboy hat at home (Bickelhaupt 53). Note the us/them implications of the use of the word “home”: this is not your home. Despite the ignorant assertions in these remarks (both Brooks and Black are urbane and Hollywood-connected), there nonetheless is a glimmer of something consequential about early performances of what it means to be country. For many, country music’s historical bedrock, the Grand Ole Opry, was symbolized by the dangling price tags comedian Minnie Pearl’s wore on her hat and the exaggerated “howdy” that introduced her performance there for more than fifty years. Similarly, Green Acres, Hee Haw, and other TV shows essentially pivoted on the lone and aged joke that rural Southerners are ridiculous. (Buck Owens was asked multiple times how he could stand to perform in such an insulting show as Hee Haw. Usually, he answered matter-of-factly that it was because they paid him a lot. However, in his 46

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posthumous autobiography Buck ’Em, drawn from recorded interviews, he is quite biting about the Hee-Haw payoff: “I couldn’t justify turning down that big paycheck for just a few weeks’ work twice a year. So, I kept whoring myself out to that cartoon donkey” [qtd. in Morris]). As with other kinds of cultural minstrelsy, the relationships are complicated among the assertive and assimilationist ways country music has confronted, constructed, and capitulated to its hayseed image. Was Minnie Pearl mocking the clash of poor rural Appalachians with city, “store-bought” culture in the familiar evocation of “trashiness”? Was she sneaking class, the great American unspoken, into the equation by pointing out how special it was for some people to wear store-bought clothing? Was this a country version of bling, akin to rappers listing expensive possessions? But there is no denying that country musicians have appropriated the “hayseed” image and turned it into an aggressive gesture. This longstanding dynamic must be taken into account in understanding the role of Haggard, his fans, and his detractors. “Ultimately, the Okie is an invention,” writes historian James Gregory decisively (247). When Haggard’s parents arrived in California, this was certainly true, and the inventing was done from the outside. The migrant very quickly became a boogeyman, seen among other things as too close to blackness. It is important to note that white Okies were not discriminated against or exploited as harshly (or as historically extensively) as were African Americans and Mexican Americans, and that constructing this hierarchy functioned as a way for landowners and employers to interrupt cross-racial, class-based solidarity. But the 47

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connection that was made between the two groups following the Dust Bowl migration was as illustrated clearly by the signs in businesses reading, “No N---rs/No Okies.” “Okies” were invented by self-styled native Californians (who were, we must remember, themselves earlier generations of migrants) as a group to feel superior to.5 Quickly, this invention was followed by concrete action. Conservatives promptly opposed their presence, forming the California Citizens Association (the officers of which included financiers and bankers) to confront the migrant situation when Haggard was a toddler. Of course, a big part of this “problem” was the threat of radical labor organizing that Dust Bowl chronicler Woody Guthrie supported with his music and his presence, through his country radio show and column “Woody Sez” in the Communist Party newspapers People’s World and then Daily World starting in 1939. But for Bakersfield musicians of Haggard’s generation, the question became, “Whose invention? Who gets to say?” Second-generation Okies—including “ethnic hero” musicians—worked to reintroduce some pride in the term “Okie.” Alice Foster gives the notion of pride a central place while introducing her Sing Out! interview with Haggard. She writes, “There is a quality in Merle Haggard that has allowed him to come to terms with his own background as well as absorb a contemporary California: grasp and take advantage

For a fascinating history of the term “Okie,” see Gerald Haslan, “What about the Okies?” in The Other California: The Great Central Valley in Life and Letters. 5 

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of a culture instead of shun it as many do if they are made ashamed” (17). Various forms of the word “proud” became increasingly prominent as Haggard moved into the “ethnic hero” role. The same year that Okie came out, he released an album called Pride in What I Am. “Pride” is prominent in “Okie from Muskogee” as well, of course. It is repeated in the chorus, which declares, “I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.” Kris Kristofferson, a great admirer of Haggard, raises the issue of “Okie pride” when he acknowledged that he initially misread the song. “I remember saying at the time, ‘Maybe that's the only bad song he ever wrote.’ I was wrong,” Kristofferson told Jason Fine of the Rolling Stone in 2009 (Fine). Invoking the power of James Brown’s black-pride funky soul music, Kristofferson notes, “That song is saying, ‘I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,’ and coming from his background in California, that’s like saying, ‘I’m black and I’m proud’” (Fine). (Interestingly, James Brown repeatedly noted his love for country music, and appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in 1979 at the invitation of Porter Wagoner.) The “I” in “Okie from Muskogee” is not nearly as clear as Kristofferson makes it, but his point remains quite defensible and revelatory nonetheless. Relevant here is that every song on the album, not counting the instrumental, is about some kind of sadness: being poor, being on the run, being incarcerated (and executed), being heartbroken— except for “Okie.” Buck Owens’s song “California Okie” (1976), which also contains lyrics referring to work and class, is, in contrast to Haggard’s much more well-known song, a more direct expression of a proud, from-within use of the 49

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term “Okie.” Owens’s song also locates the “Okie” narrator in California, which Haggard does not. Of course, Owens’s appropriation of the put-down cannot fully sap the term of its derogatory meaning—as is true of pretty much any term that is taken up by the members of the group it was used to disparage. In Haggard’s first autobiography, he says that he is sure folks in Los Angeles would see his family as “red-neck Okies . . . and in a way, we were” (Haggard, Sing 27). Words like “redneck” and “Okie”—and the music organized around them—are perhaps best described as a tug-of-war at best, and a battleground more often than not. The “ethnic hero” generation of country music is packed with contested terms that embodied regional and class-based scorn initially, and evolved into in-group pride after they were appropriated by those they were meant to put down. In order to get at the origins of some of the negative images of country music, it’s helpful to consider concretely the origins of some of the terms of description. Strikingly, they usually refer to work. (That is the most important sentence in this book, so I’ll type it again: strikingly, they usually refer to work.) For instance, “redneck” is generally bestowed with two possible origins. The more obvious one refers to that oh-so-ungenteel thing that happens to your skin when you have a job working outside in the sun. Another possible origin of the term is that it grew out of mining communities, in which miners—both black and white—wore red bandannas around their necks to symbolize union loyalty. Woody Guthrie, for instance, uses the term admiringly in his 1944 song “Ludlow Massacre,” about an incident when between nineteen and twenty-six

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miners and members of miners’ families were killed by the Colorado National Guard and the bosses’ hired guns. The term “hayseed” is also telling, invoking the stereotypical image of a country boy with a blade of grass inserted between his front teeth, thereby implying not only lack of sophistication but also laziness. The “hayseed” is supposed to be working the land, but would rather lie around (unlike his city counterpart). This, of course, is historically inaccurate, as the exploitation by landowners of black and white sharecroppers in the early twentieth-century rural South has been thoroughly explored—in scholarship, fiction, music, organizing movements, and news reports. Yet mocking those working long hours for little pay as “lazy” has an extensive history in the United States; the relationship of the lazy hillbilly image to racist stereotyping of enslaved and free black Americans has been well noted, particularly regarding the way that the image of African American overlapped with the image of the Appalachian white or hillbilly around the turn of the twentieth century. (Both, for instance, were mocked for their love of watermelon.) Especially interesting here is the fact that the closeness producing this kind of anxiety has a concrete representation musically: the banjo, which is the quintessential “hillbilly” instrument, has its origin in West Africa. The banjo becomes literally terrifying in the 1972 movie Deliverance, in which an intellectually challenged young man’s adept finger-picking turns out to signal the danger posed by backwoods, rapist “rednecks.” In a wonderful instance of historical irony, the actual banjo player on the soundtrack was a New York Jew.

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The longstanding embedding of rural stereotypes in poverty is graphically visible in the continuous cultural mocking of “hillbilly teeth.” Costume versions are always available for purchase but are particularly visible on Halloween, because what is more hilarious than people with inadequate dental and medical care? Along the same lines, online jokes stitching Haggard into this particular class-based ridicule abound. Q: What has eighty legs and thirty-five teeth? A: The first row at a Merle Haggard concert! Q: What would you never hear a redneck say? A: Merle Haggard sucks. Have you seen my Boston Philharmonic CD anywhere? Country songwriters, who have long been doing their work in the city, are plainly very savvy about how these dominant stereotypes operate. This awareness has allowed them to use the scorn that they have faced to recreate their  public image and—crucially—identify their audience, thus creating a commonality of cultural experience out of the diverse American South. As the work motif indicates, lyricists frequently accomplish this thematically. They also accomplish it by tossing tiny, potent images into their songs: worn blue jeans, small bills, cheap diners, old cars. Along the same lines, in Haggard’s generation of country music, a variety of performance styles and stances are meant to be recognized by the country music audience—thereby creating an inversion of insider-outsider positioning. The most important of these stances is probably more easily described by example than defined: it’s the hyperbolically emotional, grandiosely tear-jerking, elaborately structured, deliberately exaggerated, shrewd and clever “crying in your beer” grabber. There are hundreds of these songs 52

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in modern country music, stretching from 1950s honkytonk hits to the present. Sometimes, the simultaneously triumphant/victim wordplay is sprung on the listener once the emotional stakes have been established, as in Bobbie Cryner’s conclusion, “If you have to think it over, I think it’s over now” (1993). But other times it is waved like a flag in the song title—such as Eddy Arnold’s 1949 lament, “I’m Throwing Rice (At the Girl That I Love)”; Stoney Edwards’s 1971 declaration, “I Bought the Shoes That Just Walked Out on Me”; and George Jones’s 1990 acknowledgment that “Hell Stays Open (All Night Long).” It’s easy to see the playfulness of such lyrics in terms of their verbal cleverness—even the elitist columnist (and presidential speechwriter) William Safire considered country music a wordsmith’s paradise. But it is important not to separate the form from the content, as the overt sentimentality itself is a crucial strategy of self-identification, used quite self-consciously to mark out poetic territory. Thus, rather than referring to country music’s sentimentality—a word often used by its detractors—it’s more accurate to consider the multiple functions of its sentimental play. To lose this sense of play is to miss the point. This does not mean that these lines were not meant seriously. These “hook” songs function both as gesture and as genuine message. Wynn Stewart and Ernest Tubb, for instance, have songs that describe the jukebox telling their life story (Stewart’s “Wrong Company” in 1960 and Tubb’s “Mr. Jukebox” in 1963), richly underscoring both of these functions. Haggard himself laid this out in his “Someone Told My Story” (1967), which also points to the jukebox as 53

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chronicler. Johnny Paycheck turned up the volume on this move in 1981 with an album titled Mr. Hag Told My Story—as did Rosie Flores, whose song “Girl Haggard” (1993) deftly and hilariously works in the titles of close to a dozen of Haggard’s songs, adding a whole new level of insider-outsider signals in the songs. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that sense of play notwithstanding, country music is famous for all the songs in which men cry. It is frequently mocked for this. In fact, disparaging crying in country music is definitely one of the most common forms that contempt for the music and its audience takes. But all that contempt notwithstanding, the tears in country music represent a remarkable step away from the stoicism of “traditional” masculinity. Haggard himself has dozens of songs that he wrote or performed that mention crying, and several of these also mention jukeboxes or music as a catalyst for the tears. The title of a song by Willie Nelson, “Opportunity to Cry” (1983), lays it right out there: people need it, songs provide it. Country tear-jerking is a social service. The coded language and group identity couched in the sentimental play of postwar country was advanced by the peculiarly self-referential nature of the lyrics themselves. One  stereotype of country music is that too many of the songs are about what Mickey Gilley calls in an efficient song title “The Power of Positive Drinking” (1984). There is certainly some truth in this, and Haggard himself has a number of songs about drinking. But actually, just as many country songs of Haggard’s generation are about country songs. Or, even more tellingly, the theme of loss for which country music is still frequently mocked (particularly 54

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romantic loss, but also the loss of mother, job, freedom, etc.) was presented not only through but also as the countryWestern weeper. To put it simply, one of country music’s favorite games is to play with itself. Haggard’s song “Swinging Doors” (1966) presents a man who has been dumped by his lover. In the lyrics he tells her not to worry because he has a new home: a bar with a jukebox. There are dozens of country songs about country songs. This is a lasting characteristic of country music. Take the following song titles, quickly chosen from among hundreds of similar images: “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)” (1953); “Jukebox Charlie” (1967); “Bouncin’ Beer Cans Off the Jukebox” (2001); “She Just Started Liking Cheating Songs” (1980); “Jones on the Jukebox” (1989); “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” (1991); “How’s the Radio Know?” (1995); “A Dime at a Time” (1967); “Turn the Jukebox Up Louder” (1968). In essence, tear-jerking itself becomes a concrete cultural artifact, one connected to the fate of an audience who recognizes it, and seems to have an insatiable need for songs of loss and betrayal. Is there such a word as “meta-jukebox”? Country music, then, uses sentimentality in multiple ways. It deploys it like a secret weapon. One of these uses is as a kind of password for willing and competent listeners. Country has long built in a function of double meaning. The cultural power of this doubling was dramatically demonstrated by Ernest Tubb, who was the first country musician ever to play in New York’s Carnegie Hall. During that historic concert, Tubb (always a dignified figure in his ten-gallon Stetson) looked out over the hall and commented dryly, “You sure could fit a lot of hay in here”; with impressive efficiency, he 55

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is both acknowledging the upper-class associations with the performance space and metaphorically turning it into a barn. The awareness of multiple audiences implied by Tubb’s offhand but undercutting remark was manifested as a matter of course in many of Haggard’s songs. The most dramatic of these was certainly “Okie from Muskogee.” But Haggard’s deployment of strategic autobiography— certainly encompassing details from his past, but reaching beyond that to make cultural arguments—is perhaps the most striking and useful quality of his songwriting. The stance of the country singer as mediator in a cultural clash (and her or his complex relationship to both sides, embodied effectively by the mystifying viewpoint of “Okie from Muskogee”), with one eye on its own cultural base and the other on American culture at large, is creating as much as reflecting a group identity. Indeed, considered in this context of self-contemplation, intentionally hurtful epithets acquire substantial resonance and richness, embodying as they do a charged historical give-and-take. From Tex Ritter’s 1961 “Hillbilly Heaven” to the Bellamy Brothers’ 1989 “Hillbilly Hell,” country songs have made hay, as it were, of this ambiguity. From Haggard’s generation forward, there has been a proliferation of songs about hillbillies— and about the word hillbilly: hillbilly boogie, hillbilly highway, hillbilly Hollywood, hillbilly deluxe, hillbilly shoes, hillbilly bone, hillbilly heaven, hillbilly rock, hillbilly song, hillbilly soul, hillbilly heartbreak, big city hillbilly— not to mention Waylon Jennings’s deft “As the ’Billy World Turns.” Indeed, an old vaudeville quartet, the Hoosier Hot Shots, humorously invoked this whole dynamic, claiming 56

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in the title of their 1936 song that “Them Hill-Billies Are Mountain Williams Now.” Haggard would eventually tip his hat to this line in his 1973 version of the old song “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now),” contextually adding a layer of meaning to the song. One of the strongest lessons from Haggard is that cultural acts are not passive reflectors of a history that just somehow “happen.” Rather they are part of that history, and part of people’s coming to terms with that history. We can’t understand country music without envisioning it on a foundation of class- and region-based contempt that was not as relevant until country music went to town. There is no monolithic South. The oil rigs of Texas are a far, far cry from the swamps of North Florida, and the beaches of Southern California from the hills of Tennessee. There is an iconic South in country music, however, and it serves an important function in grappling with questions of group identity, even at its undeniable moments of genuine, ugly reaction. It is also important to remember that authorial intentions about how the music functions are telling, but not the end of the story. Just as much meaning is created by how the music is used by audiences, in both negative and positive ways. A usefully homogenized South, then, and an ambivalent and defensive image of the Southerner, is the result of growing up post-migration. Haggard was not from Oklahoma. But many people took him that way for decades. He was a native Californian, but people reminded him constantly that he was somehow Southern. His parents had real-life farming memories—ending, dramatically, when their barn went up in flames—and an identity that both incorporated them and 57

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moved on from them. Haggard had to construct an identity in some way he could live with. Country music presents itself as putting forward simple choices, as captured by another illustrative title of Mickey Gilley’s: he’s facing either “A Headache Tomorrow (Or Heartache Tonight”) (1981). But this quest to craft workingclass identity is far from straightforward, and ambivalence at playing the part “Okie”—for that’s what was really happening in Bakersfield—characterizes it more than anything else. As Steve Earle succinctly put it in a meditation on his own path to understanding Haggard’s most famous song, “The songwriter is not always the same as the characters he or she creates” (Earle SR3). Haggard’s former wife and long time harmony singer Bonnie Owens worded it best. “You can’t put your finger exactly on who he is or what he is,” she said, “because just about the time I’ve got him figured out, he becomes somebody else” (Haslan 256). The most famous song that walks this line, in fact crosses it several times in either direction, is “Okie from Muskogee,” which is without doubt one of the country songs people are most likely to have an opinion about.

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All your more sophisticated upper-class types looked down their noses at us. And when we went into the music business, they still looked down on them Okies playing that Okie music. —Rose Maddox “Things Aren’t Funny Anymore” —Song by Merle Haggard Perhaps the organizing question of this chapter should be, “How the hell can anyone take ‘straight’ a song that contains the line, ‘Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear’?” Or not be struck by the fact that when Haggard posits, “The kids all still respect the college dean,” he audibly chuckles a tiny bit? The sophisticated and bright instrumentation, especially during the song’s opening, contrasts so strikingly any lyrics about being old fashioned that it immediately and successfully couches the simple “Okie” character as a joke. But organized solely around which reading is right or wrong, what Haggard was deliberately trying to convey or

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not, sort of misses the point. (Haggard himself copped, in a 2012 interview by GQ, “There are about seventeen hundred ways to take that song” [Heath]).1 In fact, one of the most useful aspects of “Okie,” it turns out, is that the song quickly came to provide a vehicle for projection—perhaps most importantly, for professional-class educated types to justify and enjoy the mockery of working-class people. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in her Oklahoma memoir Red Dirt, takes this dynamic head-on: We Okies are those tough, land-poor losers whose last great hope in the American dream was born and died with the “opening” of Oklahoma and Indian territories. Our great shame, like all “white trash” and colonial dregs, is poverty, that is, “failure” within a system that purports to favor us. The dregs of colonialism, those who did not and do not “make it,” being the majority in some places, like most of the United States, are evidence of the lie of the American Dream. (48) “Okie from Muskogee” is a very useful springboard for looking at the wider picture of how country music functioned as an idea. Indeed, if “Okie” didn’t accumulate so many powerful misreadings, the song likely would not have mattered much at all. To understand “Okie,” in other words, we have to broaden our vision to include much more than the song itself: What conversations was it entering? What other This was a formulation Haggard articulated about “Okie” throughout his career. It was a politic answer—not denying or confirming anything about the song. 1 

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songs were similarly taken up as a way to define country fans? What did various listeners get out of waving it like a flag— or burning that flag? Haggard himself has not always been consistent in what he claims were his intentions—not that we can necessarily trust what an artist says about her or his own song. The Temptations insisted that “Cloud Nine,” released the same year as “Okie,” is not about drugs. Mississippi John Hurt maintained that “Coffee Blues (Spoonful),” recorded in 1963, is about coffee. There is a fair amount of evidence that Haggard’s manager and label insisted that he shut the hell up about what he really meant in “Okie,” so that it would keep on selling; in fact, a relatively early article in the Charleston Gazette (April 17, 1971) observes that while Haggard wrote “Okie” as “sort of a hip joke,” if he hadn’t carried on with the “profitable” reading of the song, “his manager would have cut his throat” (Brack 51). Strikingly, given how pro– Vietnam War many people have insisted “Okie” is, the photo of Haggard that accompanies the article has him flashing a peace sign. “Okie” definitely made Haggard rich. (Despite this, he was to file for bankruptcy later in life, in 1993, before getting his financial act together.) This is legible in many places, including the number of his records the song appears on and the lyrics to a song that refers to a friend bringing him a bag of groceries before “Okie” was recorded. But payoffs don’t come only in cash. Although it is important to acknowledge the bushels of evidence about how Haggard initially meant the song (both in the song itself and in how Haggard spoke about it over the years), the question should really be, what is the payoff of hearing the song in the various ways it has 61

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been categorized since its release? Right or wrong—whatever that means—listeners are making declarations through their interpretations and are clearly getting something out of those declarations. Haggard recorded “Okie from Muskogee” the same year the seminal countercultural movie Easy Rider was released, and a mere three weeks after the Woodstock music festival took place, during which the Grateful Dead performed “Mama Tried.” “Okie,” which among other things states that folks don’t smoke pot in that town and that they don’t grow out their hair despite the example of hippies, very quickly began to function as a token of the supposed jingoism and conservatism of country music’s audience. The commonest story Haggard told about writing the song goes like this: Haggard and his band were in a bus when they saw a sign that said, “19 miles to Muskogee.” “I’ll bet they don’t smoke dope in Muskogee!” said one of the Strangers to laughter. It’s easy to imagine the statement was made because at least some of the group were smoking pot in the bus—another common story about its origins. Haggard then supposedly wrote the song, together with his drummer Eddie Burris, in about twenty minutes. But tellingly, Haggard has not been consistent about this origin story; the year after “Okie” came out, for instance, he told a reporter that he got the idea for the song while home in Bakersfield watching the TV news: “‘The item on the news said the Bakersfield police had caught two guys going through town with a load of marijuana, and the newscaster said one of them was from Muskogee,’ Haggard said” (Danville Register 16). True or not, the lesson of that 62

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story is that Haggard wanted the reporter to know that they smoke a whole lot of marijuana in Muskogee, although the song’s lyrics state otherwise. When the song began to function as shorthand, it was usually not quoted. It was enough just to say its name: simply referring to it carried a load of meaning. Edward Abbey, for instance, invokes “Okie” as an anti-counterculture symbol in his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. When someone plays Haggard on a jukebox, another character shouts, “You get my Janis back on there!” (192). In the 1982 romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman, “Okie” operates as a similar shorthand. Explaining her refusal of a marriage proposal, a woman exclaims, “I don’t need no Okie from Muskogee!” In the 1986 Vietnam War movie Platoon, “Okie” is used to identify a group of “redneck” soldiers, contrasted with another group listening to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” The connotative potency of “Okie” is demonstrated by the fact that the filmmakers chose the song even though the movie is actually set before “Okie” came out. More than forty years after “Okie” was released, a 2002 piece in the Boston Globe described Toby Keith’s jingoistic (and, frankly, stupid) post–9/11 song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” as “The Okie from Muskogee of today” (Capobianco F1).2 And in 2015, a promising academic, Charles Hughes, published a book about the important “triangle” of the 1960s and 1970s musical production formed Interestingly, Toby Keith recorded a song that is pro-lynching (“Beer for My Horses”)—but didn’t get the same degree of pushback for this one, perhaps because it was a duet with Outlaw country singer Willie Nelson. 2 

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by the studios in Nashville, Muscle Shoals, and Memphis— but whenever Hughes needs a country bad guy in the usefully geographically oriented story he is telling, he still reaches west and grabs Haggard. There are more of these examples that you could shake a stick at. But occasionally, the real project of this Okie contempt slips out. A particularly sharp example is a video uploaded to YouTube in 2013 called “The People of Walmart Set to Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee.’” With Haggard’s song playing in the background, the video takes up the project of a website consisting of photos and captions mocking Walmart shoppers, mostly through class ridicule that frequently takes the form of insulting women based on body size.3 This contemptuous interpretation of “Okie from Muskogee,” then, has lasted for decades, despite the fact that Haggard has repeatedly said the song was written as a joke or commentary, and consistently signaled this joke in performances. If you want to witness this for yourself, there are several quite amusing TV recordings of the song. On Hee Haw in 1969—while somewhat surprisingly playing “Okie” on the piano surrounded by the Strangers—Haggard twists his neck to look at a band member’s long hair—a gesture he would continue to make over the years. The band member, in response, grabs his hair with his hand. And on The Porter Wagoner Show in 1970, each band member’s facial expression shows that they are wry, at least. Haggard also adds an audibly

The “People of Walmart” is also linked to a site called “White Trash Repairs.”

3 

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sardonic spoken “by golly” after the line about displaying the American flag at the courthouse. The literal and contemptuous reading of the song has lasted despite the fact that Haggard gave numerous interviews along the lines of one that was published right after “Okie” came out, in which he insists, “I don’t condemn anyone for anything they do. Like I’d let my hair grow long if I wanted to, you know” (Foster 16). It has lasted despite the fact that Haggard had, by then, acquired a large hippie following, including important musical acts such as the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, all of whom covered his songs (Gram Parsons of the Burrito Brothers while wearing a Nudie suit covered with marijuana leaves). It lasted despite the fact that Haggard’s 1971 song “The Farmer’s Daughter” introduces a poor Oklahoma farmer whose daughter is in love with a hippie—and he is fine with it. And despite the fact that another Haggard song the same year, “Big Time Annie’s Square,” is also about a romance between two former Okies in California—one who ran off from Checotah to California to join the counterculture, and her devoted “square” boyfriend who followed. The latter song even mentions the LSD-laced sugar cubes popular in Annie’s circle, entirely non-judgmentally. After “Okie,” however, “Hippies glowered at Haggard when he played the road,” wrote Paul Hemphill, “often insisting he sit and talk with them about Vietnam and poverty and the like (which, to their amazement, he did)” (331). Haggard fills “Okie” with lyrical clues that it’s not meant straight. In addition to boots and college deans (remember, 65

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Haggard attended only nine days of high school, let alone college), he notes how much Okies love white lightning— homemade liquor that is by definition illegal and therefore parallel to pot, and that is by far the most familiar motif in the mocking of “hillbillies.” (How many cartoons can you think of that picture a hillbilly holding a jug with “xxx” written on it?) Delightfully, the chief of police in Muskogee in 1975, responding to a question from a newspaper columnist about the accuracy of Haggard’s lyrics, tells the journalist that there is no more white lightning, but there is marijuana (as is true, he remarks, just about everywhere). Well, why did Haggard write the song, then? asks the columnist. The police chief generously hazards a guess: “Maybe just because Muskogee rhymed with Okie?” He goes on to note that even if the town isn’t the way Haggard described, they have a lot of “bunch of fine young folk— even if they do smoke marijuana” (Pitts 1). Haggard also carefully undercuts the sentiment of “Okie” through the set list of the live show. The two songs leading up to “Okie” are “White Line Fever” and a so-rockin’-it’s-barelycountry instrumental written for the album, “Blue Rock.” While “White Line Fever” is about a trucker experiencing highway hypnosis on the surface level, those titular white lines are referred to as an illness, something the narrator cannot resist. This quite gorgeously invokes cocaine use, another kind of white lines and another kind of addiction. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five recorded a song titled “White Lines” in 1983 that is explicitly about cocaine use. The year after “Okie,” the rock band Little Feat’ released their best-known song, “Willin’,” which is also about trucking 66

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and drug use. On the country side, Shooter Jennings (Waylon Jennings’s son) recorded a song called “Little White Lines” that is similarly direct about drug use and refers to white lines on the highway. And as for “Blue Rock,” well, the Okie album was preceded by songs directly acknowledged to be about meth (which was not considered a “controlled substance” until 1970 and was widely used by long-haul truckers). For instance, the Doors had sung in trippy vocals to trippy instrumentation about doing a blue rock two years earlier in 1967, and the only persistent argument about Tommy James and Shondells’s “Crystal Blue Persuasion” from 1968 is whether it referred to meth or LSD. So if Haggard’s song is not the heartfelt voice of conservative Okies, is Haggard mocking Okies? If that is the case, what he feels for them is far more complicated than derision. In addition to the fact that his family were Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, he has repeatedly claimed that his musical inspiration came from this background—a self-identifying move that matters more for the banner it waved than for any musicological accuracy. And Haggard’s other “Okie” songs are either sincere tributes or anguish over the burdens the migrants carried. Is “Okie from Muskogee” a joke about the notion that participants in the counterculture are really so different? If so, a flurry of what I think of as “hippie-redneck” songs rushed into the picture to address this: Charlie Daniels’s “Uneasy Rider” (1973), David Allen Coe’s “Long-Haired Redneck” (1976), Doug Sahm’s “You Can’t Hide Your Red Neck (Under All That Hippie Hair)” (1977), Johnny Paycheck’s “The Outlaw’s Prayer” (1978), and others. Paycheck’s song, which tells the story of his being 67

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denied entry into a church because of his long hair and beard and jeans, makes sure to point out that the people looking down on him are actually rich. In fact, when Haggard introduces the song on the “Okie” album, he points out the man who introduced the band that night, Carlton Haney, is, as it happens, a hippie. But he’s a “country hippie,” declares Haggard—efficiently imploding the distinction between the two. Haggard and his band would continue to perform this subversiveness about “Okie from Muskogee”; for me, a hilarious and memorable performance of this took place in the now-closed New York club Irving Plaza in 2000. When Haggard sang the line, “We don’t make a party out of loving,” his backup singer and former wife, Bonnie Owens, called out, “I do!” If we take “Okie from Muskogee” in context and pay attention to internal clues, the song seems most like a joke about people who have forgotten about the locations in Haggard’s other “Okie” songs. (No one would miss the fact that it was a joke, Bob Dylan acutely remarked much later, if the song had been recorded by Randy Newman.) We can’t understand “Okie from Muskogee” without encompassing the broken-down, bank-owned farm in Oklahoma invoked in Haggard’s version of “California Cottonfields,” and the camps where “a hungry man [could] live at” in “They’re Tearing the Labor Campus Down” (1972—a song that swings, as it happens). Thrown into the pot that what Haggard wanted to release as a follow-up to the release of “Okie” as a single was a song called “Irma Jackson,” which is about an interracial romance and condemns those who oppose it. His label, Capitol, refused to release it for several years—and no 68

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doubt instructed him to come up with something along the lines of what they ultimately did release in 1969 as a followup: the anti-protestor “Fightin’ Side of Me.” (Music critic and rock historian Peter Guralnick noted that Haggard released the song “only under pressure” [241]). When “Irma Jackson” did come out, it was on Haggard’s 1972 album Let Me Tell You about A Song, on which he reflects upon each song before performing it. Haggard remarks, “Of all the songs I’ve written, this may be my favorite because it tells it like it is.” Furthermore, “Irma Jackson” is not Haggard’s only or the first heartbreak song about racist disruption of an interracial love affair. The year before “Okie,” he also recorded “Go Home,” a song about an Anglo man who falls in love with a Mexican woman and brings her back to his hometown— where, to his dismay, his racist friends and family convince her to leave. Haggard wrote another follow-up song that was more a reply to the response to “Okie from Muskogee” than to the song itself, and one that went unreleased. In that song, titled “Somewhere in Between” (not to be confused with 1967’s “Somewhere Between”), Haggard seeks to locate himself rhetorically in the song as someone who isn’t tied to categories produced by social divisiveness. And, perhaps more important given the obedient college dean–respecting kids invoked in “Okie,” in “Somewhere in Between” Haggard declares that while he is an adult, he is not unable to understand the young people who sometimes disagree with him. Haggard recorded that song twice, in 1970 and 1971, but it did not see the light of day until a CD box set of Haggard’s Capitol recordings came out in 2008. 69

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In short, trying to nail down “Okie” will always prove to be quite challenging. The song is slippery. The only thing that is plain here, and it’s very plain, is the extremely self-conscious way in which, as the child of Okies, Haggard confronts the image of the rural Southerner—the rural Southerner who is no longer in the rural South. *** Despite the fact that Haggard is from California and Muskogee is in Oklahoma, the song quickly came to be used as a tool of anti-Southern scorn. Several terms crop up repeatedly over the decades as a way to describe “Okie.” Militant conservatism. Backlash hit. Anti-hippie. Reactionary anthem. Redneck flag. The song we love to hate. My personal, tips-its-hand favorite: “Beer-gut mentality.” One academic commentator, Tom Juravich, makes plain the work these dismissals are doing: in an essay titled “Workers and Unions in Country Music: A Look at Some Recent Releases,” he refers to the song as “Okie from Miscogie.” That elaborate of a misspelling (37.5 percent of the letters are wrong) is not a mere typo: Juravich does not know the town, or its people, or the song. He literally does not see them. Juravich, it must be noted, reveals his blind spot regarding country music a number of times in this piece: for instance, he uses Hank Williams Jr. as an example of anti-union sentiment because of a lyric he seems to think states that unions are opposed to the workers—except that the next line finishes the thought: it’s opposed to their being exploited. But country music “blind spots” are by no means limited to the ivory tower. Reviewer Ann Powers, for instance, remarkably adept when it comes to 70

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rock music, as late as 2000 (in a review of the show I attended at Irving Plaza, as it happens) not only mouthed decadesold Haggard-cliches (“anti-hippie anthem,” for instance) but also noted that it was a set Haggard had “undoubtedly been performing for years” (Powers). Meanwhile, everyone who has ever played with Haggard, or has spoken to him or his band members, or has read interviews with him, or has followed his career as a fan, had been commenting for years that he never chose songs, arrangements, or instrumental solos ahead of time. (Google “Haggard” and “ad lib.” I’ll wait.) Haggard addressed this somewhat somberly in the piece on him in Down Beat, fretting that once or twice for a TV show, he had to fix the format ahead of time. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he confessed. “I can’t work that way” (Schneckloth 19). Of course, using music as a vehicle for scorn does not require accuracy or “authenticity”—if there is indeed such a thing. After all, American mass culture was born wearing a minstrel mask and drenched in structural racism. A persistent example of this dynamic regarding music and Southerners is in the simultaneous condemnation of “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974) by Lynyrd Skynyrd as provincial and reactionary and idolization of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by the Band (1969)—a sympathetic song from the point of view of a Confederate soldier. (Skynyrd, it is worth noting, covered Haggard, delightfully and funkily introducing their version of “Honky Tonk Night Time Man” with the words “Little bit of Bakersfield!”) When I have argued with acquaintances about the “Sweet Home”/“Dixie” paradox, they have insisted that the 71

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character in the Band song was poor, had been tricked, and did not have his interests served by the Confederacy. This is certainly true—but it is not the end of the story, and as the title alone indicates, it is still a “Dixie” song. In Steve Earle’s similarly-themed song, he’s much more careful with his language and he is not so damn romanticizing, taking care to note that the narrator was never a slave-owner, for instance, and having him speak in non-standard English to indicate class position (neither of which “Dixie” does). I remember locking horns with someone about “Dixie” (which, although I love the Band, I find difficult to tolerate for precisely this reason); she defensively said to me, “The song is just against the Northern aggression and the looting of Southerners’ homes and land!” and then enacted that very aggression (symbolically, but that is what music is for) through region-based contempt for the Skynyrd song. “Besides,” she insisted, “the Skynyrd song is more angry.” Well, why shouldn’t it be angry? The looting mentioned in defense of “Dixie” makes the case for the anger. The fact is, if Virgil Kane, the protagonist of “Dixie,” had great-greatgreat (however many) grandchildren, where would they have been in the 1970s? Likely at a Skynyrd concert, pissed off, still poor, still tricked. The biggest trick of all is the conflation of losing the Civil War with their class position— sadly, reparations might never be given, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if no one could inherit money that came from slave labor? Atlanta-native Killer Mike of Run the Jewels has come up with the most effective way to navigate this dilemma. “Long live the South,” he declared, “and quickly die the Confederacy” (Golden). 72

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Furthermore, Neil Young’s “Southern Man” (1970), which Skynyrd was responding to with “Sweet Home Alabama,” is totalizing and insulting. It defines “Southern” as by default white, in effect erasing Southern African Americans. Young and the members of Skynyrd were friends, but Skynyrd got offended, and they wrote “Alabama” in response. An important context for the Skynyrd-Band comparison includes the fact that Skynyrd sometimes had black band members. This was never true of the Band. Skynyrd also had black audience members—they are visible in concert footage. This was not appreciably true of the Band. Skynyrd was part of an interracial (if admittedly imperfectly so) music “scene,” which they go out of their way to mention in “Alabama” with their invocation of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, where Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, and others were recorded. Ronnie Van Zant had always been outspoken in his opposition to George Wallace’s politics, and Skynyrd always said they wrote the song because they didn’t think all Southerners should be characterized as racists. “Shooting at all the ducks in order to hit one or two,” was the way Ronnie Van Zant put it. This is not to say that the lyrics of “Sweet Home” are necessarily completely simple to parse. But Van Zant has always insisted that he meant that line about Wallace to be critical, established by the fact that the African American backup singers boo the idea that they love him in Birmingham. (In an early Rolling Stone interview he fretted about whether critics heard the booing.) Further, the last (spoken) line in the song declares joyously that Montgomery, Alabama, has solved the problem—a reference to the bus boycott of 1955–1956, 73

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which started with the courageous activism of Rosa Parks and was successful because of the commitment of black domestic workers. In 1976 (two years after the song was recorded), Van Zant endorsed and campaigned for Jimmy Carter. In 2008, when Mike Huckabee used Skynyrd’s music in some campaign rallies, Skynyrd’s most devoted fans were extremely pissed off because Van Zant had been such a Democrat. But he wasn’t just an across-the-board Southern champion. He criticized the region’s gun culture in one song (“Saturday Night Special,” from 1975). He has a song in which the character realizes that his macho father is wrong for telling him not to cry—in essence, not to feel (“I Never Dreamed,” in 1977). And he is the author of the only song I can think of in which the male narrator cops to pissing himself because he was scared. This is in “Gimme Three Steps,” on their very first album, in which a jealous boyfriend threatens him with a gun, and, he admits, “The water fell on the floor” (1973). “Southern Man” is hardly the only song that projects racism onto poor Southerners instead of rich ones who inherited money from slave labor. It is eclipsed by Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s “Southern Boys,” which not only makes the “all-Southerners-are-racist-and-by-extension white” claim, but also directly makes fun of poverty. In fact, there is a visible American tradition of making fun of reactionary rich people by calling them poor: Sarah Palin’s family were frequently called “snowbillies,” for instance, and Rolling Stone’s generally trustworthy reporter Matt Taibbi, groping in an otherwise instructive piece about the chicanery involved in the bailout of Wall Street’s moneyed interests for an analogy to communicate how seemingly ad 74

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hoc crisis measures have been institutionalized, writes, “We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn” (Taibbi). It couldn’t be put more bluntly: to insult billionaire bankers and show that they really are thieves, Taibbi, who was raised in an overwhelmingly white and wealthy New England suburb and attended a fancy prep school, calls them poor Southerners. At best, Taibbi is being lazy here, reaching for a slur that is near to hand to squeeze shock value out of a hateful stereotype: Southerners are poor because they deserve to be. (A bit of context: the poorest states as I write this are Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee.) At worst, Taibbi is rearticulating Ronald Reagan’s disgusting image of the “welfare queen” who takes and takes, but is unwilling to contribute to society. This image was frequently directly applied to Okies when Haggard was growing up. During what Ellen Reese identifies as the “first welfare backlash,” the minutes of the California State Welfare Board in 1949 refer to fears that Okies (along with Mexicans and African Americans) would take advantage of welfare programs (92–93). In other documents, they were called a “degraded American stock” who placed a “new burden to the health, education, and welfare resources in rural communities” (Stein 48; White 482).4 The word “welfare” “Degraded American stock” flipped into “Okie/Aryan” in Ed Sanders’s description of Charles Manson and his followers, the best known of which were mostly from middle-class families and not from Oklahoma. 4 

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was thrown at Okies repeatedly, from letters to the editor to statements of public policy. This is an image Haggard directly confronted. In “Workin’ Man Blues,” which closes out the first side of the Okie album, Haggard sings, “I ain’t never been on welfare, and that’s one place I won’t be.” It’s an aggressive line, introduced musically as an interruption to the melody of the song. But where is the aggression aimed? At people on welfare—or the many people who criticized California Okies thick and fast for being on welfare? In other words, there is a big difference between someone from a group of people repeatedly invoked as on welfare declaring that the stereotype is wrong and one of those very mockers sneering at an Okie and saying, “Well, I’ve never been on welfare.” In a musically successful instance of laughing to keep from crying, Buck Owens joked about the association with welfare in a song directed at a hoped-for lover, “Waitin’ in Your Welfare Line” (1966). The image of poor, lazy groups of Americans invoked by Taibbi and challenged by Haggard knocks at the door of a ringing defense of twenty-first-century capitalism, wherein the poorest people endanger a healthy economy and the better-off are at risk of contagion from them. It’s particularly frightening in the context of the American history of segregation to put forth, as Taibbi does, an image hinging on how dangerous it is when the wrong people get into your neighborhood—which was one of the strongest reactions to what historian James N. Gregory calls “the Okie problem”: hostility toward 1930s Dust Bowl migrants. In 1969, this “Okie problem” slid neatly into Haggard’s “Okie” problem. They are, of course, related. 76

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The conflated contempt for Okies and “Okie” is especially audible in straight-up parodies of Haggard’s song. Perhaps the best known of these is by Chinga Chavin (the stage name of non-working-class advertising executive Nathan Allen Chavin), whose song “Asshole from El Paso” was released in 1976. While the song is frequently noted as a blistering response to Haggard’s supposed conservatism, its setting is seldom noted. “Asshole from El Paso” appeared on Chavin’s album Country Porn, which was sold through Penthouse magazine. Here a partial song list from the album: “Talkin’ Matamoros First Piece O’ Ass Blues,” “Cum Stains on the Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used to Be),” “Sit, Sit, Sit (Sit on My Face),” and “Tit Top Rock.” Assholes from El Paso, it turns out, among other things fuck sheep (an old stereotype of rural dwellers) and drink Lone Star beer (which had not yet been hipsterized and was associated with the working class). The assholes also apparently underpay Mexican workers, moving the blame for class inequalities and labor exploitation perpetuated by the rick onto the shoulders of working-class people in the same way that Taibbi did. “Asshole” would soon be covered by Chavin’s musical associate, Kinky Friedman, with his band The Texas Jewboys. Friedman also invoked the song in the name of his 1976 album Lasso from El Paso, which has musical contributions by Eric Clapton, Levon Helm, Dr. John, and T-Bone Burnett, among others. Friedman had, by then, established himself as rude and daring. His best-known song, “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore” (1974), demonstrates this very clearly. In this song, the narrator beats up a “redneck” racist 77

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in a bar, to the musical delight of all present. However, it must be noted that Friedman uses the setup as an occasion to recite a long list of racist and ethnic slurs the guy uses— apparently his own use of “redneck” doesn’t count—his voice indicating how delighted and daring he feels. John Denver, on the other hand, is mostly known as soft and safe, musically and lyrically. Nonetheless, he performed a similar parody of “Okie” in 1973. Denver begins by singing “Okie,” and then launches into parody: Now, every time I see those hippie peace freaks, It really makes me feel like I’m a man. If I had my way I’d join the Ku-Klux And I’d burn them with their draft cards in their hands. I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee; I’m proud to be a redneck from the South. Everywhere those Wallace voters know me— “Love me, or I’ll punch you in the mouth!” The equation of “Muskogee” with “the South” is especially instructive. So is Denver’s mention of George Wallace, as Haggard emphatically turned down Wallace’s invitation to work on his Alabama gubernatorial campaign in the post“Okie” days. (The white supremacist David Duke would ask him to perform at a private party and Haggard, in his own accounting to a reporter from the Phoenix New Times, “told him to go get fucked” [Ruggles]). Denver’s attack on Haggard and “Okie” was part of a parody written by Patrick Sky, who recorded a full version in 1971 but did not release it until 1973 because the lyrics were too dirty. (Sky also sings to a different tune—not “Okie,” as John Denver did, but a 78

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very familiar tune for country audiences as it had been used by that time multiple times.5) Sky’s lyrics omitted by John Denver are as follows: Now, the way we get our kicks down in Muskogee Is to beat up everyone who isn’t white Well, it’s muscatel and honky-tonks and ripple Yes, we like living free and being right . . . Well, so come on you good men who love America And would like to keep our good clean country free From them commie marijueena [sic] smoking preverts [sic] Who fill their engines up with STP Taking a markedly different tack but still conflating contempt for “Okie” with contempt for Okies, the folk-influenced rock band, the Youngbloods, performed a song invoking “Okie,” called “Hippie from Olema” (1971), which isn’t humorous at all. Instead, it takes on the cartoonish characters in “Okie” as though they were real, and offers a sweet version of the song in which hippies open the doors to everyone. However, because the song lists a few things that hippies from Olema never do, there is, perhaps, a structural implication that “Okies,” in fact, do those things: litter beer cans on the highway, dump The tune had been used at least five times before Sky took it up: “Thrills That I Can’t Forget” by Welby Toomey and Edgar Boaz in 1925, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” by the Carter Family in 1929, “Great Speckled Bird” by Roy Acuff in 1936, “The Wild Side of Life” by Hank Thompson in 1952, and an answer to Thompson’s song by Kitty Wells the same year, called “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.” 5 

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oil into the ocean, treat someone badly if they are black. In the question of dumping oil, the Youngbloods work the same territory as Taibbi in vilifying the poor for the crimes of the rich: the year “Okie” was released, there was a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara, which was at the time the largest in US history and remains the third largest. A major company, Union Oil, was responsible for the spill—not Okies, I swear! The Youngbloods’ song is almost cloyingly sincere, but it does include a few small “winks”; for instance, the song starts by noting that they welcome strangers who are ragged, but then switches to saying they welcome strangers who are haggard (invoking both Merle and his band, the Strangers). And while Haggard’s song ends with an invocation of “Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.A.” the Youngbloods swap out “U.S.A.” for the whole planet. Interestingly, although the Youngbloods are careful to avoid any national pride in the song, Jimmy Buffett picks up “Okie” in the context of what it means to love America on a song on his first album, “Captain America” (1981). The title character is heroized in the song in opposition to Spiro Agnew. In order to show that the character is hip, Buffett points out that he doesn’t like “Okie from Muskogee.” Unlike the blandness of “Hippie from Olema,” street rock singer David Peel’s parody “Hippie from New York City” is deliberately weird as hell and even kind of confusing. That weirdness is quite useful, though, because it lays bare how hard it is to tell what “Okie” is making fun of. Peel had recorded an audacious album titled Have a Marijuana for Elektra in 1968 before being rediscovered by John Lennon, which would lead to an album called The Pope Smokes 80

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Dope in 1972. In between these weed-focused albums, Peel performed his offbeat Haggard-invoking song on television with a large, weird, flat-affect, ignore-the-camera band and— bizarrely—John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting in. The song seems to set out to mock “Okie.” It sets up a narrative voice, the title character, who is the opposite of Okies: a person who is dirty and druggie and anti-South. It talks in quite rough language about hating ignorant, war-fighting, animalfucking rednecks. But in the song’s over-the-top, “we”-voiced defense of hippies (the lyrics claim pride in being dirty and living in a cockroach-infested garbage) and Peel is revealing the strategy of “Okie”: making fun of a stereotype, not expressing feelings from the heart. Whether this revelation is intentional is another question entirely. (Let me know if you figure it out.) It’s truly hard to know what to make of Peel’s song, not to mention the raggedy TV appearance. But for the purposes of understanding the function of “Okie from Muskogee,” the messiness of Peel’s parody is perhaps its most instructive part. In contrast, the point of view of Chelsey Carroll’s similarly satirical “Hippie from Mississippi” (1970) is easier to parse—and telling in a number of ways. Tune, loose guitar work, and lyrics are all meant to sharply convey that the song presents the point of view of those Haggard is supposedly ridiculing. What is most interesting here, though, is that in order to do this, Carroll locates the narrator not in California, and not in Oklahoma, but rather in Mississippi—representing a common move in identifying Haggard with the supposedly backward South and revealing one of the goals of anti-“Okie” scorn. Carroll’s 81

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protagonist describes himself as a student activist leader and notes that his family is so very embarrassed by his exaggeratedly long hair (3 feet!) and his refusal to join the military that they have felt the need to change their names. Carroll’s song directly quotes “Okie,” as the narrator notes that he, too, doesn’t turn loving into a party—but the reason is that no one in his Mississippi will go out with him. The song concludes with the hippie from Mississippi deciding to head out to San Francisco and join the counterculture (and, if all goes well, to get laid). C. Dean Draper picked up this satirical spirit and ran it much, much farther down the field in “The Only Hippie in Muskogee” (1973). His song is written to the tune of “Okie,” and focuses on how lonely it is to be a hippie in Muskogee. In fact, this song is so over-the-top that, as with the original, it’s hard to tell who or what is being mocked here. The hippie is presented just as ridiculous as the rest of Muskogee—for whom a greased pig contest at a county fair is as violent as it gets. In the song’s spoken outro, Draper declares—as did Carroll—that he is going to head for California. Draper’s song reminds us that most musical invocations of “Okie” are not only making listeners laugh; they are laughing at listeners for laughing at “Okie.” The country-rock band Pure Prairie League (who took their name from a temperance union, which was fighting the drug that Okies in Muskogee found to be the biggest thrill of all) addressed Haggard literally in “I’ll Fix Your Flat Tire, Merle” (1975). The song is less direct in invoking “Okie,” but in many ways is more direct about what is really being mocked. The song presents itself as cartoonishly Southern, 82

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from the accent adopted by the singer (the word “oil” is pronounced as “erl,” for instance) to the over-the-top, steelguitar-dominated instrumentation. It has a very different sound from any other song on the album—or from any song of Haggard’s. The song refers to Haggard as a “honky,” notes that his songs mock the counterculture, and insists that if he wants to understand the world, he needs to smoke some pot. It also notes with contempt that Haggard has been made rich by the song, enacting a dynamic pointed out by songwriter Shel Silverstein in a song he wrote called “Redneck-Hippie Romance.” Compared to the complexity of “Okie,” Silverstein’s take on this is sort of limited. But it does point out that rednecks dress up trying to look rich, while hippies dress up to look poor. Contempt for Haggard in certain circles did not cease in the face of mounting evidence that “Okie” was a satire—through later songs of Haggard’s, through his variegated interviews about writing the song, through internal contradictions of criticisms and parodies. Berkeley countercultural poet Charles Potts wrote in 2009 that learning that Haggard smoked pot was seeing “everything/ turned inside out.” Yet rather than viewing this as proof that “Okie” was satirical, Potts instead chose to take this as a sign of Haggard’s hypocrisy. Haggard, he writes, has changed his tune, but we should not forgive him: “Turns out the ‘Okie from Muskogee’/turned into the Pothead from Bakersfield/ With no apology yet foreseen/For the damage hippy hating did to this/Defunct Vietnam War torn country” (Potts). ***

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Not everyone heard “Okie” as an invitation to heap disdain on the Southern (or Southern-associated) working class, of course. A delightful group of other musicians noted in their own songs and in their covers of “Okie” how ridiculous they found the reflexive denigration of the song by more welloff audiences. Perhaps most famously, “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers,” written by the frequently satirical Texas singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard and made famous by his fellow Texan Jerry Jeff Walker in 1973, humorously calls out the misreading of “Okie from Muskogee.” The title is taken from the anarchist group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, who in turn took their name from a 1967 poem by Black Arts Movement poet Amiri Baraka (“Black People!”). Abbie Hoffman referred to the anarchist group as a “middle-class nightmare”; Hubbard, in writing “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers,” pointedly declares that “rednecks” are part of that nightmare (qtd. in Jezer 131–132). The song introduces the unnamed “redneck” through a series of familiar but ramped-up stereotypes: his wife’s hyphenated first name, for instance, puts four names together instead of the usual two, he drives a pickup with a gun rack, drinks cheap beer, and beats up hippies in a bar. At the end of the song, the singer spells out “mother” by offering a “trashy” example, each drawing upon a familiar stereotype, of what each letter stands for: “M” is for a pickup truck’s mudflats, “O” is for the oil that he uses to slick back his hair, and so forth. Significantly, “H” stands for “Haggard.” Wylie is pointedly commenting that Haggard’s reputation is part of a laughable (literally) and ridiculous middle-class stereotyping of the 84

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“redneck”—who is also, in the song, beating up hippies. To drive the point home, the song ends with a tacked-on phrase invoking the last line in Haggard’s song, identifying the city, state, and country in which “Okie from Muskogee” is set. This song quickly established itself as an inside joke. David Peel nods to Hubbard’s song in “Hippie from New York City,” by noting that hippies actually quite like when rednecks are up against the wall. The alt-rock band Cracker (formed by two Californians) recorded an updated version of the song on an album that includes two Haggard covers in 2003. And the contemporary country group Blackberry Smoke, in their “I Can Feel a Good One Comin’ On” (2008), declare that listening to “Redneck Mother” chases away the blues after the work week is over. African American country singer O. B. McClinton, a.k.a. the Chocolate Cowboy, efficiently invoked the misreading of Haggard’s song and wrote himself into the looked-downon story in his self-titled 1973 album, Obie from Senatobie. Recorded shortly after McClinton released a straightup cover of “Okie from Muskogee” in 1971, “Obie from Senatobie” gives a peek behind Haggard’s satirical curtain as the narrator slyly reminds listeners that in his hometown— Senatobia, Mississippi—folks still eat watermelon. In other words, McClinton is joining and expanding upon a musical joke about racial stereotypes. In the “Obie” narrative, the mere fact of coming from “Senatobie” is grounds for mockery—which, of course, was the result of “Okie.” In addition to lyrically invoking “Okie from Muskogee” (the tune is different), McClinton sings on the album a “straight” cover of a wonderful song of Haggard’s, co-authored with 85

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Haggard’s (and Buck Owens’s) ex-wife Bonnie Owens: “Today I Started Loving You Again.”6 But the most instructive aspect of “Obie from Senatobie” is the fact McClinton makes very clear the central politics of both songs—his and Haggard’s—by mentioning in the very first words of the song that the moment when he declares himself to be “Obie from Senatobie” is while he is serving in Vietnam. McClinton is thereby adding a sharp reference (and joining other musicians who did so) to the question of who ended up in Vietnam because they didn’t have options to get out: black people and working-class people (with a great amount of overlap, of course). Blues singer/songwriter John Lee Hooker sums this dynamic up quite gracefully in the titles of two of his songs: “I Don’t Want to Go to Vietnam” and “I Gotta Go to Vietnam,” both from the same year that “Okie” came out. Haggard himself frequently and straightforwardly claimed that “Okie” was, in part, about who had to fight and who had the privilege of deferment; one early instance of this explanation appeared in a July 13, 1971, interview in Look, in which he notes, “The people who work don’t have time to riot or protest. Too busy working” (Wren 36). He took up this question even more starkly in his follow-up to “Okie” and

McClinton is not the only black artist to cover Haggard: he is joined by Percy Sledge, Millie Jackson, Junior Wells, Barrence Whitfield, B. B. King, and others. Not surprisingly, given Haggard’s lyrical and musical engagement with border questions, a noticeable group of Chicano artists cover his song as well, including Freddy Fender’s gorgeous cover of “Silver Wings,” part of which he sings in Spanish, up to Los Hermanos Jimenez’s fairly recent (2012) cover of “Okie from Muskogee.” 6 

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what is arguably his most right-wing song, a defense of the US military, 1970’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” *** Before “The Fightin’ Side of Me” came out, though, the question of who must fight and who had options for avoiding military service structured a song that is carefully presented on the Okie album as part of the setup for “Okie”: “Billy Overcame His Size.” The song introduces a character named “Billy” (get it?) who is the looked-down-upon son, the less preferred, the one with fewer opportunities. While the “fortunate son” doesn’t have to go to Vietnam because he has a football scholarship and therefore a college deferment, Billy does have to go, and dies there. The late pride Billy’s father feels in him certainly comes across as defensive here in the face of loss. This painful dynamic is taken up with impressive efficiency by genre novelist Michael Hiebert in his 2013 mystery Dream with Little Angels: the child-narrator wonders how a character whose father and son both died in wars could remain “the single most patriotic person I ever met, with nothing but pride for our country’s military forces.” His mother explains that “pride sometimes is the only way you can keep going after something like that” (25). California country songwriter Johnny Russell presents the same overlay of defensive patriotism and economic class in a delightfully rude, metaphorical way in his 1973 song, “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.” Shining a light on sharp associations of military service with class, Haggard associates prison with class in his autobiography in a similarly self-defensively macho way: “I’d 87

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like to see a few lying business executives and lawyers . . . try to make it inside the joint,” he writes (My House 131). Those who tend to get locked up are, in other words, the same class of people as those who get sent to fight in wars. By then, Haggard had frequently described a great deal of disgust at the penal institutions. In a 1969 interview, he points to the hushed-up murders of prisoners by guards, especially a recent one at the Arkansas State Farm, where, he says, there were “12 hundred inmates buried down there that they killed. Right here in America” (Foster 13). He comments that he knew about these murders because “the grapevine between penitentiaries is pretty strong.” The people in charge of prisons and juvenile detention centers are sadists who often take the work, says Haggard, “so they can get their kicks . . . by whipping those kids.” He describes being caught running away and being forced to run for four hours while wearing shoes of the wrong size as punishment.  When  he  tried to stop, a man broke a fence post over his back and he ran for another hour. “You know, that’s sadism,” the adult Haggard who had just written “Okie” observed (Foster 15). This is not a man who blindly follows the authoritarian line: his life has not given him that option. Clearly, it’s not a far step from Haggard’s defense of murdered working-class prisoners to his defense of murdered working-class soldiers. A leading historian of the Vietnam era, Richard Polenberg, has dispensed thoroughly with the misconception that the working class didn’t oppose the war—his research shows that in fact, by the end of the war, working-class Americans opposed the war in the greatest numbers. They just had to go—and they had to confront 88

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that. And confronting social realities is, of course, one of the things that popular music is for. It should not be surprising, then, that there are many country songs about who fights and who remains at home. Dave Dudley, most famous for an ur-trucker song, “Six Days on the Road” (1963), lays this out clearly three years before “Okie from Muskogee” in his version of the jingoistic “Vietnam Blues”—written, somewhat startlingly, by Kris Kristofferson, who is not only considered “progressive” for country music but who, as we have seen, initially resisted “Okie” as reactionary and sang a parodic version.7 The setup is a soldier on leave who encounters an antiwar demonstration in Washington, DC. The narrator growls that the funny-looking protesters made him sick. In response to their signs declaring that they won’t fight, he sneers that they would prefer to have a solider die in their place. The meaning of the song resides in the tiny bit of hesitation before the word “soldier”: Who is the singer really saying has to fight in the place of those protesters? The song ends with the soldier saying that he has an hour to catch a plane to Saigon and that he doesn’t want to die—but he doesn’t want to crawl. The song is full of instructive class- and region-based hints: dropped “g”s on the ends of words, non-sardonic use of the word “ain’t,” an ending that describes hurrying off to a bar. Johnny Cash—five years older than Haggard—expressed a similar preoccupation with who had to fight in an interview In a 1993 performance of the song, Kristofferson explains that people he knew who went to Vietnam thought they were defending the little guy. But, he adds, his position on Vietnam has “taken a 180-degree turn.” 7 

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with journalist Paul Hemphill, who had taken up the question with Cash in a discussion of his collaboration with Dylan that resulted in the album Sessions 1969—the very same year as Okie. Cash, trying to articulate some of the complications not only of the collaboration with Dylan, but also of what people said about that collaboration, acknowledged to Hemphill, “Some of these writers have said stuff about how it didn’t fit, that Dylan’s for one thing and I’m for another.” “How do you feel about, say, Vietnam?” “We’re over there.” “Do you support it?” “I support our Government’s foreign policy . . . I’ll tell you one thing, when you see our boys being brought back in helicopters and their guts spilling out it makes you a little mad about some of these folks back home.” (Hempill 101)8 Cash’s expression of resentment of “folks back home” subtly invokes how the question of privilege revealed by who had to fight and who didn’t was a defining factor in his voicing of support for the war. Cash’s younger brother, Tommy, also took up the question of Vietnam in song, throwing a lot into the simmering pot that was the discussion of the war through his quite hawkish Cash would come around to calling himself a “dove with claws,” shooting for a combination of “hawk” and “dove,” to indicate his complicated stance on the Vietnam War and its fallout. People have been arguing for decades about how to reconcile Cash’s respect for protestors with his loyalty to Nixon. It’s a fascinating debate—and again, shows us what music is really for: hosting these conversations. 8 

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1970 song, “So You’re Tired of America.” He sneers at men growing long hair, disrespecting the flag, burning draft cards, criticizing the police, and participating in demonstrations while others have to fight. But then Tommy Cash brings racial (and perhaps class-based) solidarity into the song by accusing antiwar protesters of not paying enough attention to what black and white men could do together, including improving schools. It is important to note that there were plenty of country songs that flat-out opposed the war. “The Cry of My Lai” by Ivan Lee (1971) and “Ballad of My Lai” by Matt McKinney (1970) both condemn the 1968 massacre. Billy Starr’s “Letter from Vietnam” (1970) refers to the killing of Viet Cong as “murder.” Bob Withers’s “What the . . . Is Going on in Washington” (1966) is a quite early condemnation of the war—furthermore noting that the people they were now supposed to be killing were on our side in defeating fascism, and that the United States is losing allies because of the war. In Steve Dorrier’s “What’s the Matter, Mommie?,” sung in a child’s voice, the narrator learns that his father has been killed in Vietnam and decides to write to the president and urge him to end the war; the song is followed up by “Letter to the President,” which takes the form of the titular letter promised in the first song. In Oneda Harding’s “Peace in Viet Nam,” two mothers (one in the United States and the other in Vietnam) give birth simultaneously; ultimately, their sons face each other on the battlefield, and die side by side, both unidentified. Bobby Jay’s “Help! I’ve Been Drafted” is a humorous treatment of the hand-grenading of superiors that was known as “fragging.” As early as the 1960s, Arkansas 91

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singer Aubrey Roberts’s “Little White Cross” uses the phrase “war machine.” The Wilburn Brothers—both of whom served in Korea—recorded multiple songs about Vietnam, including “Vision at the Peace Table” (1970), “Little Jimmy from Down the Street” (1970), and “The War Keeps Draggin’ On” (1971). But these are only a few examples of the songs; their number includes “Jimmy Gets a Gun for Christmas” (by L. E. White in 1971), “Viet Nam” (by Pat Bohlman and Edwin Maderia in the 1960s), “Not Another Viet Nam” (by the Perry Brothers in the 1960s), “Oh God, Please Bring My Daddy Back” (by Jon & Margie Cook in the 1960s), “Hell in Vietnam” (by Ben Showalter in 1967), “Congratulations (You Sure Made a Man Out of Him)” (by Arlene Hardin in 1971), “Crazy Viet Nam War” (by Stringbean in 1966), “4 a.m. in Vietnam” (by Earle Epps in 1970), “There in Viet Nam” (by Faith Willow in 1967), “The Wars Go On” (by Jim Mansell in the 1960s), “Vietnam Rotation Blues” (by Lefty Pritchett in 1972), “That Crazy War” (by Dick Unteed, date unknown), “Thoughts on Vietnam” (by T. W. Cartwright, date unknown), “The Blind Soldier from Vietnam” (by Curly Herdman in 1968), “Blue Soldier” (by Curly Herdman, date unknown), “Wars Like Vietnam (by the Laurendeau Sisters,” date unknown), and “Killed in Vietnam” (by Janie Allen, 1960s). A number of songs were recorded in the voice of a child wanting her or his Daddy back, beginning as early as 1963 (Bob Decaise and Lil Gary D’s “Mr. Where Is Vietnam?”) and carrying into the 1970s (for instance, The Truehart Kids’ “If Your Dad Were a Prisoner of War.”) There are also many songs about losing a lover or child that don’t directly either criticize or defend 92

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the war, but do powerfully indicate who is drafted, such as Ledford String Band’s “He’s Comin’ from Vietnam” (1971) or “My Son Is Home from Vietnam,” by Little Dale, in which the father can’t even pay for the taxi to pick up his returning son.9 Other country songs emphasized the tragedy of Vietnam and expressed a defensive pride in those who had to fight. Songs in this category include Dolly Parton’s “Daddy Won’t Be Home Anymore” (1970) and Jerry Reed’s “Fightin’ for the U.S.A.” (1965). And there were patriotic country songs that were critical of the war. Loretta Lynn’s 1966 “Dear Uncle Sam” was a surprisingly early antiwar statement, one Lynn has consistently stood by, insisting that she wrote the song because she thought the war was wrong. Lynn’s song would be joined by George Riddle’s “Lonesome Vietnam” (1966) and Glen Campbell’s “Galveston” (1969). Riddle’s and Campbell’s songs are all perhaps best described as aching. And all introduce narrators who are frightened and upset about being called up, even if they feel the need to defend the duty to fight. As James Robert Wilson put it in his introduction to a collection of testimony from Vietnam War veterans from the US South, While patriotism undoubtedly led many southerners into the military in the 1960s, another, more coercive force also had an impact on them: the draft. Poor whites and blacks who could not gain the deferments offered by college or marriage found themselves particularly exposed to Songs are listed without dates when I have been unable to confirm when they were recorded. 9 

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conscription. For more than a few of these men, necessity assumed the mantle of virtue, for they saw in military service a way out of the poverty they had known all their lives. (xiii) The story of country music and the Vietnam War did not end with the war. There was a collective sequel located in country songs about the post–Vietnam War experiences of soldiers.10 A particularly melancholic example is George Jones’s 1998 “Wild Irish Rose,” which tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who comes back broken. He is quickly institutionalized, but when public funding for the hospital is cut, he ends up living—and ultimately dying—on the streets. A different, and Haggard-centric, sequel to “Okie” according to many listeners was enacted by Haggard himself in 2001, when he teamed up with another California Dust Bowl Okie, Chester Smith, to record an album with multiple antiwar songs on it, including one by Haggard (“After We Go to Guns”). The following year, he announced at a show (and was quoted doing so by longtime progressive columnist Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch) that he’d like to “give John Ashcroft a hand—right in the mouth.” And he ripped into George W. Bush’s militarism from the stage in 2005. The compelling connections between the workingclass Vietnam story and the power dynamics that “Okie”

Many of these songs focus on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC: George Jones’s “50,00 Names Carved on the Wall” (2004), Moe Bandy’s “Chiseled in the Wall” (1996), Remember When’s “Long Black Wall” (1989), Phil Coley’s “Big Black Wall” (1980s), and numerous others. 10 

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establishes are the subject of Texas singer-songwriter and left political activist Steve Earle’s 1988 song “Copperhead Road.” Earle introduces a narrator who volunteers to fight in Vietnam the day he turned eighteen. The reason he gives for this is clear: “white trash” are the first called up, anyway, so he might as well join. Earle’s character notes that both his grandfather and his father made moonshine until they were shut down by the feds. But after the narrator returns from two tours of duty in Vietnam, he follows in their footsteps by planting marijuana. It’s hard not to see this song as a commentary on “Okie.” First, the real reason for what seems like quick support for the Vietnam War is made quite clear. Second, Earle points out that by bringing moonshine into the equation, Haggard is revealing that the whole “law and order” thing is a joke. The notion that someone would seriously rail against marijuana while declaring affection and pride for “white lightning,” by definition illegal, is simply silly. *** The arrow Steve Earle draws from serving in Vietnam to serving up marijuana is a useful reminder that many soldiers used drugs to get through their time in the military, and to navigate the PTSD they came home with. It also reminds us that country music is littered with references to pot and other drugs. Well before the Okie generation found its voice, country swing pianist John Boyce “Smokey” Wood, head of a group with the historically rich name, the Modern Mountaineers, was given his performing nickname because of his commitment to lighting up. His band recorded a song called “Mary Jane” in 1941 (and a song called “Everybody’s 95

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Truckin’” in 1937, in which the “T” sort of morphs into another consonant.)11 Many drug songs, such as “Take a Whiff on Me” and “Cocaine,” were handed around among blues musicians, jug bands, “hillbilly” singers, folk singers, folkrock bands, rock bands, and commercial country acts. For instance, Dick Justice, a “hillbilly” singer and miner in West Virginia, recorded “Cocaine” in 1931 after learning it from Virginia blues vocalist Luke Jordan. Tampa Red recorded “I’m Gonna Get High, It’s Tight Like That” in 1928, and then the Tune Wranglers recorded “Red’s Tight Like That.” The Harlem Hamfats’ “Oh! Red,” about a man whose lover gets headaches (or worse) from smoking pot, was covered by Western swing bands. W. A. Nichol’s Western Aces, a hard Western swing band, recorded “Cocaine Blues” in 1947; the song was then covered by multiple artists, including Johnny Cash in 1960 (as “Transfusion Blues,” though he recorded the song later as “Cocaine Blues”) and Haggard in 2011. Many of these songs use clever early slang for marijuana (blue sage, tea, ace, Mary Jane), frequently landing the burden of deciding what the intended meaning is squarely on the listener. The 1960s generation of music has its roots here, of course—but the new songs about marijuana also established connections to the emerging songs about the Vietnam War. For many conscripts, Vietnam is where they first encountered drugs that ranged from pot to more serious ones. But a range of commentators have continued to allow literal readings of “Okie” to obscure country music’s

His band also had a song called “Working at the Wrong Keyhole.”

11 

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stoner history. For instance, the Village Voice declared with bemusement in 2014, “Even Country Music Is Ready for Marijuana Legalization.” And historian James E. Perone, in his book Music of the Counterculture Era, writes that “the use of the country style in a pro-marijuana song might seem to be curious, if not oxymoronic (the antidrug sentiments of Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’ were more typical of country music).” Perone does not come up with any other antipot mainstream country songs. Country songs that mention weed often follow an “I-get-high-from-loving-you” formula that establishes recreational drug use as an experiential benchmark. But plenty of others simply describe smoking pot. In 1950, Okie chronicler Doye O’Dell recorded “Candy Man,” and in 1959, Ken Clark and the Merry Mountain Boys released another song with the same name. Middleof-the-road country singer Ray Stevens’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (1969), written by Kris Kristofferson, refers to being stoned. Also in 1969, Kristofferson’s “The Junkie and the Juicehead Minus Me” overlays drug use, service in Vietnam, and country music aspirations. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen recorded “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues” (1971), which uses the titular condition as a metaphor for having had his lover leave him for another man. Charlie Daniels states that he starts his day by smoking pot in “Long-Haired Country Boy” (1974). Hank Williams Jr. recorded “Stoned at the Jukebox” in 1974 and insisted that smoking dope is a “Family Tradition” in 1979. Jim Stafford, country singer and comedian, praised the feeling he got from smoking “Wildwood Weed” in 1975. John Hartford, author of Glen Campbell’s biggest hit, “Gentle on My Mind,” 97

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recorded “Two Hits and the Joint Turned Brown” in 1976. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings romantically declared “I Can Get Off on You” (1978), listing the drugs they no longer needed. In 1981, the thoroughly mainstream Alabama recorded, “I’m Stoned.” Haggard recorded “Natural High” in 1985. In 2006, David Allan Coe teamed up with members of the Texas heavy metal band Pantera to record, under the name Rebel Meets Rebel, “Cowboys Do More Dope,” a song that quite explicitly connects recreational drug use to country music.12 Not surprisingly, the song name-checks Willie Nelson—with whom, in 2015, Haggard recorded a duet called, “It’s All Going to Pot.” The video for the track has the two singers in the studio, recording and passing around a joint. In other words, they are not only revealing that they partake of marijuana—they are directly connecting it to their work as musicians. Several years earlier, in a 2009 interview, Haggard had told a Rolling Stone writer, “I don’t know if quitting will make you live longer . . . But it’ll damn sure seem like it’s longer” (Fine). He was, not surprisingly, smoking weed during that interview. In 2011, while performing in California, Haggard interrupted his performance of “Okie” to ask the audience, “Everybody that’s for marijuana, say ‘Aye!’” After the enthusiastic response, he added, “and the ones that don’t like marijuana can go to hell.” Eric Church recorded “Smoke a Little Smoke” in 2006—on the same album that contained “Pledge Allegiance to the Hag.” The album mentions not only cowboys but Indians, containing an explicitly antiracist, anticolonialist critique of the way the US government treats Native Americans. 12 

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Both of Haggard’s “as told to” autobiographies, 1981’s Sing Me Back Home and 1999’s My House of Memories: For the Record, use drugs (and sex) to demonstrate the shifting and complicated nature of Haggard’s relationship to his most famous song. Sing Me Back Home is framed by Haggard purportedly telling co-author Peggy Russell, “I want you to know right off . . . that I’m not goin’ to stay sober all through the writin’ of this book” (Haggard, Sing 281). Over the course of the book, Haggard barely mentions “Okie from Muskogee,” and fully avoids any discussion of either the content or the reception, writing briefly, “When award time rolled around in 1969, we had ‘Okie from Muskogee’, which took it for song, album, and single” (Haggard, Sing 218). That’s it. No other mention of the song at all in close to 300 pages. Haggard also goes out of his way in the two memoirs to reveal that in contrast to the lyrics of “Okie,” he did indeed make “a party out of lovin’.” He uses fairly vulgar language overall—referring to getting a “piece of ass,” for instance, and noting that he and Bonnie Owens acknowledged that there would be “other women” while they were married (Haggard, Sing 132; 218). In My House of Memories, Haggard admits directly to getting stoned and dropping acid, again strategically using a great deal of vulgarity: recounting a fantasy about flipping shit in cops’ eyes, recalling a visit to a “whorehouse,” describing taking a girl’s virginity, and admitting to sleeping with strippers. In fact, it must be noted that this utter lack of respect for the college dean, so to speak, is how Haggard wants to open this second memoir: on the opening page, he declares, “I’ve lived through seventeen stays in penal institutions, incarceration 99

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in a penitentiary, five marriages, bankruptcy, a broken back, brawls, shooting incidents, swindlings, sickness, the death of loved ones, and more” (My House xi). Haggard has been musically hinting at recreational drug use for some time—from the possible indicators on the Okie album to the somewhat bizarre if funky version of “Set My Chickens Free” he recorded in 1994, which raises the specter of the LSD that structures the original even though he establishes some plausible deniability by swapping out dropping acid for dropping vitamin C—a common piece of drug slang (see the Grateful Dead’s 1970 song “Truckin’”) but also, if necessary, a cover. *** Not surprisingly for a song that received as much attention as “Okie” did, covers abounded. In 1970 alone, there were more than twenty released just in the United States (and still more recorded abroad). Some of these covers were calculated attempts to ride on Haggard’s coattails. But many of them added fascinating voices to the social conversation swirling around the song. They frequently give the lie to what scholar Peter La Chapelle calls the “dominant reading” of the song (begging the question, “Dominant among whom?”) (193). An immediate and contextually striking version of “Okie” was performed less than a year after the original “Okie” concert as part of the 1970 show at New York’s Carnegie Hall by vocally antiwar left-wing folksinger Phil Ochs. (A recording of the concert would be released on album in 1975.) By all accounts, Ochs’s performance of Haggard—and the fact that he was wearing a gold lame Nudie suit—initially drew a hostile response from his audiences. By then, Ernest 100

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Tubb’s verbal dumping of hay into Carnegie Hall (see above) had already established that when certain performers stand on that particular stage, commentary is by default built into their appearances. There are thrilling examples of this, ranging from a subversive Tubb to a dignified Paul Robeson performing a new version “Ol’ Man River” with resistance replacing the resignation in the original lyrics, to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention performing “Shove It Right In,” an automatic assault on the front-parlor values associated with the venue. Ochs seems to have understood what playing music frequently considered “trashy” by the usual Carnegie Hall–goers would mean: the title of the album is Gunfight at Carnegie Hall. Much later, Haggard noted the kind of dynamic at work here, confessing that he was quite gratified at having won a Kennedy Art Center award because the award “comes from people who don’t normally identify with our music” (Brooks). The year after Phil Ochs deployed “Okie from Muskogee” as a bullet in his metaphorical gunfight, the Grateful Dead performed the song with the Beach Boys first at the Fillmore East rock club in New York, then in Central Park. By this time, the Beach Boys had, indeed, let their hair grow long and shaggy (no need to comment on the Dead’s hair), and they and the Dead did not hide the fact that they took plenty of trips on LSD. Video of the Central Park performance indicates that the song, however, was performed perfectly straight by a band that includes black members. Visible in the video is a diverse countercultural audience happily dancing along. The band’s invitation to the audience to sing along demonstrates an expectation that they know the words. 101

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The Beach Boys and the Dead were not the first to cover “Okie” at the Fillmore East in 1971—illustrating just how much the song had become a cultural touchstone. James Taylor—widely known as coming from a very wealthy family—performed “Okie” the year after it came out in a cartoonishly wistful tone and odd accent, inserting jokes to make it clear that he’s kidding by singing it. For instance, during one round of the chorus, he calls out “Everybody!” as though asking people to join in, but in the next line he calls out, “Nobody!” Interestingly, there are elements of Taylor’s career, and collaborations make it clear that he does love country music—if you focus on his backup singing on George Jones’s 1978 recording of a song Taylor authored, “Bartender’s Blues,” you can hear that he is completely thrilled. But he wants to make sure to distinguish himself from the “Okies” he smeared with the word, “Nobody!” And the audience’s response during the song is almost exclusively laughter. A truly puzzling cover of “Okie” came out the same year, by Boston-based folk-jug band leader Jim Kweskin on a 1971 album called Jim Kweskin’s America. The album cover is quite psychedelic, immediately and literally wrapping “Okie” and its supposed antidrug lyrics in a drug-inspired aesthetic. On the line mentioning California hippies, there is an audible choked laugh in the background, but overall, the version is fairly straight. Backup vocals are provided by Boston-area commune-or-cult (depending on who’s calling it) Mel Lyman and the Lyman Family. There is a spoken bit at the end, in an exaggeratedly shaky voice meant to invoke an old man, who describes learning through travel that the most important 102

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thing is home. The doubled meaning established here is very effective: On the one hand, it is the recognizable (and even, according to some, corny) notion that in country songs, “home” is what matters the most. But at the same time, the Lyman Family adds a new angle to the emphasis on “home” that includes countercultural explorations and the creation of “home” and “family” as a chosen act. Covers of “Okie” have continued into the present, with the most effective ones offering relevant twists on the original through deliberate changes—in gesture, in lyrics, in mood, in context. For instance, a version by Los Hermanos Jimenez in 2012 includes conjunto accordion (with a swinging solo  in conversation with a sneaky bass line), immediately emphasizing the idea of borders, quite pressing in California. In this way, the musical world has churned up nonstop examples of how relevant both readings and misreadings of “Okie” are, both to those looking to raise themselves in the class-regional-occupational hierarchy by sneering at Okies and to those looking to comment on the hierarchy by laughing with “Okie.” When the first wave of reaction to the song had hit, a stunningly sophisticated reading of Haggard’s persona was published in the West Coast Communist Party newspaper, the People’s World: If Merle Haggard is a conscious right-winger, then so are a lot of other people in the U.S. The straight fact is that Haggard represents in a public way the resentments and aspirations of the southwestern working people, who have an importance greater than their number. Haggard is the son of Okie parents who rode their running boards to the 103

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promised land during the Depression. He worked in the oil fields near Bakersfield. From the nothingness that is the lot of working people in a capitalist society, he has managed to become a star in a type of music that is both a glorification of that nothingness and a cry against it. (Qtd. in Haslan, 194) And when Haggard died on April 6, 2016, the descendent of the People’s World published an obituary that referred to him as “working man’s poet” who wrote songs for the American working class “to drink to, to dance to, and to cry to” (Hall). The misreadings of “Okie,” then, have had a direct and legible motivation. At one time, scrawling “No Okies” on hiring signs or movie theater posters was a way to enact class-based hierarchy. After artists such as John Steinbeck (and John Ford, whose award-winning 1940 movie version of Grapes of Wrath was immediately critically acclaimed) created sympathy for that population, it became rude to express class-based disdain in this way. But the disdain had not disappeared. It simply changed form—and Haggard’s joke provided a convenient vehicle. There is a direct line, a visible trajectory, therefore, from those hollering “goddam Okie” in Steinbeck’s novel to those hollering “goddamn ‘Okie’” at Haggard.13 A marvelous encapsulation of the way Haggard became a sort of class-based lightning rod came in his exchange with Richard Nixon, when Haggard played at the White House in Haggard, it must be noted, found Steinbeck’s portrayals of Okies to be condescending. 13 

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March 1973. Nixon reportedly told Haggard that if he would keep singing songs like “Workin’ Man Blues,” maybe some working-class folks would get “off their asses.” That comment represented a “classic misunderstanding between social classes,” wrote Paul Hemphill. “A ladder-climbing president and a wide-eyed son of an Okie family” (337). That evening, Haggard performed for a group of people way too fancy for country music, who apparently only applauded for “Okie from Muskogee.” Haggard would comment later that Nixon “hadn’t hung out at the same places I did” (Ashby 415). But the White House misunderstanding of “Okie” was nothing new. Johnny Cash had performed at the White House shortly before Haggard (in April, 1970) in a visit arranged by a close friend he shared with Nixon: Vietnam War supporter, bomb proponent, vocal antifeminist, and Cold War agitator Reverend Billy Graham. Cash received a request that he perform “Okie from Muskogee” and Guy Drake’s equally satirical “Welfare Cadillac” (1975), both of which Nixon took literally. Cash—to his credit—instead launched into the proprotester “What Is Truth?” A storyline quickly developed that Cash simply refused to play a song as right-wing as “Okie,” though Cash himself noted in his autobiography that he just didn’t know the lyrics and the requests did not come in early enough for him to prepare. Cash’s younger brother, Tommy Cash, had recorded a version of “Okie from Muskogee” in early 1970, just months before his brother’s visit to the White House and months after the original came out on LP. This could have contributed to Cash’s lack of desire to “own” the song and thereby cast his shadow over his brother. In any event, it’s fascinating—and a tiny bit creepy—how on this 105

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recording, the younger Cash sounds like the love-child of his older brother and Merle Haggard. Of course, American popular music is littered with satirical or caustic songs that have been taken by some at face value—Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984), R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” (1987), dozens of songs about candy. And it is not uncommon for those mistaken literal interpretations to be accompanied by an industry-mandated inability to counter them for market reasons. For instance, in a Rolling Stone interview right after the release of “Born in the U.S.A.” not only does Springsteen refuse to say that the song was intended to mean the opposite of blind patriotism, but he also refuses to say whether he votes Democrat or Republican—a stance he has been able to move away from now that he is established as a star, though leading critic Greil Marcus has written, “Clearly, the key to the enormous explosion Bruce’s popularity is in [that] misunderstanding” (qtd. in Gilmore). But whether Haggard is joking or dead serious, taking on racism through lyrics or sound, singing about heartbreak or riding the rails, the experiences of “working people in a capitalist society,” as the People’s World obituary directly puts it, is a huge element of his music (Hall). Most strikingly, he recorded a version of Woody Guthrie’s “Jesus Christ,” a song that posits that Jesus was killed for asking the rich to share with the poor, to play over the credits of progressive filmmaker Michael Moore’s 2009 Capitalism: A Love Story. There is a reason, it turns out, that so many country songs are about being cheated.

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Country Music and Labor: Hag’s Two Hands For labor, who will sing? —Louis Zukofsky “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today” —song by Merle Haggard Because of the light Haggard shined on a class of people frequently excluded from top-down histories and “high” literature, fairly early in his career he became known as the “working man’s poet,” sometimes rendered as “poet of the common man.” This was because many of Haggard’s songs directly took up the question of work. The most powerful aspect of Haggard’s treatment of labor is the musical balance beam he walked: work was presented not only as an activity, but also as an identity. Workers could be exploited, but still helped each other. Work was not romanticized, but his characters could still be proud of it. The Okie album pairs Haggard’s most (in)famous song with one of the best known of his many songs about labor, “Workin’ Man Blues.” Through the title of this song, Haggard is immediately placing himself in a robust tradition: there

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were many songs in many genres with that title already out when he wrote his own—and many to come after his.1 Haggard sings the song in a tone that is part resigned, part proud, and part protest: “I’ve been a workin’ man, dang near all my life/I’ll be working, long as these two hands are fit to use.” It’s hard to know whether he is saying that early retirement isn’t an option for him financially—or that he insists on making this contribution. Significantly, the first three times Haggard articulates the words “workin’ man blues,” it is in the phrase, “Sing a little bit of these workin’ man blues.” But the last two times, “sing” becomes “cry”—a sly indication of the toll working-class labor takes, as well as of one of music’s reasons for being. “Sing,” as it turns out, equals “cry” a lot of the time, if you’re country—and with good reason. Strikingly, on the Okie album “Workin’ Man Blues” is followed by a song about poverty and death: “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” in which the title character dies alone in the

Some examples (including both completely different songs and significant covers) are by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (1923), Lizzie Washington (1930), Floyd “Dipper Boy” Council (1937), Blind Boy Fuller (1937), Peetie Wheatstraw (1937), Sleepy John Estes (1941), Guitar Slim and Jelly Belly (1944), Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band (1946), Lonnie Johnson (1948), Hank England and the Kentucky Valley Boys (1956), Jimmy Liggins (1961), Louisiana Red (1963), Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry (1963), Johnny Copeland (1964), Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (1980), Albert Collins (1986), Doug Duffey (2006), The Devil Makes Three (2009), Aceyalone feat. Ceelo (2013), Jonah Tolchin (2016). These are songs with the same name as Haggard’s; there are at least as many with slightly different names but the same organizing impulse. Oh, and let’s not leave out Melanie Ayers, “Woman with a Working Man’s Blues” (1999). 1 

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cold. This juxtaposition is powerful: the poor are, in the end, ignored. Haggard’s role as “ethnic hero” meant that much of his attention to class was through the type of character-driven song that “Workin’ Man Blues” represents. To tell the truth, Haggard recorded enough first-person labor songs to constitute their own book. His “Five Days a Week” (a 1996 duet with Johnny Paycheck) turns the Beatles’ celebratory “Eight Days a Week” into country’s specialty—honky tonkin’ through pain—by pointing out that if you are a blue-collar worker you have no choice but to work eight hours a day, five days a week. “Old Man from the Mountain” (1974) introduces a sawmill worker who has labored his whole life and worries that he is being cheated on while he has been working. (The implication is that he is being cheated while he is working—by the sawmill owner.) In “5:01 Blues” (1989) the narrator wants to be glad the work day is over, but no longer has someone to return home to. But just as significant as the heartbreak storyline is the way Haggard conveys the type of work being done: the narrator knows the workday is over because a whistle blows, indicating that it’s a factory job. “Huntsville” (1971), one of Haggard’s multiple prison songs, and one that includes his name in the lyrics, reminds listeners of the connection between incarceration and exploited prisoners’ labor. (Haggard’s fellow Californian Ice Cube would devastatingly and succinctly make this commentary in just three words, also conveying the racialized nature of prison labor, in his brilliant 2006 song “Nigga Trap,” which refers to prisons as a cement version of the ships that transported enslaved Africans.) In “Chores” 109

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(1994), Haggard takes on the voice of a single father in order to establish housework as serious labor. And, of course, Haggard has many migrant farmworker songs—in “One Row at a Time” (1971), for instance, he talks about the weight of the hundred-pound sack dragging him down. It’s easy to see the metaphor Haggard is establishing here, and impossible to imagine all that weight somehow disappearing when the cotton picker is finally able to quit for the day. Haggard’s worker-persona-driven storytelling is noteworthy for his emphasis on providing images of a class that is frequently absent from social conversations. This remains important in a society in which at any moment news sites are carrying admiring photographs of the British royal family. But Haggard’s music also contains great material for what I think of as the “scavenger hunt” method of interpreting country music. Yes, there is usually a lyrical narrative and yes, the subject matter is of great importance. But there are also small, concrete hints dropped throughout the songs and the albums, and they are equally important in conveying the song’s meaning. Haggard frequently encodes this in his album art. For instance, on the cover of his 1976 album A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today, Haggard is pictured sitting on a bench wearing head-to-toe denim—in other words, identifying as blue collar. At his feet is a metal lunchbox, with “Hag” written on it, affiliating Haggard with workers. Other album covers picture Haggard or his band members in white undershirts, associated with workingclass men. (Sleeveless ones, such as the one pictured on one of Haggard’s band members on the cover of Pride in What I Am, are currently ironically called “wife-beaters” although 110

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there is no actual correlation of class with domestic violence. The fact that this particular album title with its articulation of pride runs directly above this sartorially class-identified band member is, however, striking.) Similarly, the Okie album art includes a photograph of the audience from behind, featuring multiple audience members wearing plaid shirts. And on the album Haggard includes an abbreviated version of “Swinging Doors,” in which he mentions that his new residence boasts a neon sign—in the context of his listeners, it’s a working-class high sign. This is really worth keeping in mind when grappling with Haggard’s catalogue, which is jam-packed with songs that make the connection between bar time and work time. Really, any country song that contains the word “Friday”—and there are many—is actually establishing the singer or audience or character as worker. George Jones’s “Finally Friday” (1992) makes the connection very clear by inserting the title of “Workin’ Man Blues” into the lyrics. “Workin’ Man Blues” not only mentions cutting loose on Friday; it mentions getting paid on Friday—a trope of songs in a range of genres. (In pre–Second World War blues songs, this is frequently expressed as “the eagle flies on Friday,” because of the depiction of an eagle on dollar coins.) That detail about being paid weekly is another nod to the kind of job the narrator has and, by extension, his class position— as does Haggard’s inclusion of phrases such as “dang near.” Hell, the dropped “g” in “Workin’” when the song is listed on the album itself conveys a reservoir of meaning about class. It’s a significant rhetorical gesture, since after all Haggard is just using a common pronunciation of the word “working,” 111

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and could certainly have written it out fully. But he didn’t: a point is being made by writing the word as “workin’,” a whole statement on region and class crammed into one letter of the song’s written title—actually, the absence of one letter. A similar revelation is contained in an all-too-common misreading of how the lyrics of “Workin’ Man Blues” should be written. Haggard sings that he might “get a little tight on the weekend,” referring to drinking in the taverns that the song mentions, but in online listings of the lyrics, this line is consistently written as “get a little tired on the weekend.” In other words, a significant ideological act is contained in the assumption that the working man should be noble and “tired” instead of “tight” and loud. And imagine what happens if we extend this a little to all the country songs about “getting tight” that have been received with disapproval from certain quarters!2 “Workin’ Man Blues,” then, has a richness of meaning that involves much more than the lyrics or even the performance of the song itself. Haggard once again enacts a commentary by carefully positioning it on the Okie album: after swinging through the song, with a delivery that is defiant and colloquial, he then leads into a song he learned from Jimmie Rodgers, “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride.” Haggard introduces “Hobo Bill” by noting that freight train was a useful method of travel for the “migrant worker, or the fellow out of work”—noting that they were “respectable men” nonetheless, which is conveyed

In a duet of the song Haggard sang with Willie Nelson, they change “tight on the weekend” to “high on the weekend.” 2 

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by the song’s rather high poetic diction. This transition is incredibly important, a move from a defiant member of the working class who is tired but proud to a song about how out-of-work, on the move, freight-hopping men should not be looked down upon. The song ends with the title character being found dead out in the cold—hence the titular “Last Ride.” Thus, “Hobo Bill” has taken the pride of “Workin’ Man Blues” and turned it into loss and death. Further, on the record album, “Workin’ Man Blues” closes out side A, and “Hobo Bill” starts side B. In fact, the most important moment on the “Okie” record is arguably the short silence between those two songs, however long it takes a listener to flip the record. Forty-seven years later, Bob Dylan would record a breathtaking tribute to—and historical update of—Haggard’s song, his deeply moving “Workingman’s Blues #2” on the album Modern Times. (The album title invokes another portrayal of working-class blues: Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film with the same name.) Dylan’s song quotes “Workin’ Man Blues” in a repeating line (“sing a little bit of these working man’s blues”). Pushing against notions of clearly marked generic boundaries (something else he shares with Haggard), Dylan also refers in “Workingman’s Blues #2” to the jazz standard “Black and Blue.” “Workingman’s Blues #2” invokes Haggard directly and indirectly though it is more tragic than proud, more defeated than obstinate. The job Haggard describes wearing him out in “Workin’ Man Blues” has moved abroad, in Dylan’s song. As many of Haggard’s fans were well aware, “Workin’ Man Blues” was situated within country music’s historically 113

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defining focus on work. It takes its place in a longstanding, rich musical tradition that adds layers of meaning to the song. Hank Williams Sr., widely known as the “king” of modern country music, points to the connection between work and commercial country music quite early, in his 1952 “HonkyTonk Blues.” The song tells of a young boy leaving his parents’ farm for city work and musical enticements—they are bundled together—in the city. But even before Hank Williams came along, country music was steeped in this work-song tradition, for among the first commercially distributed country songs were many labor-related “hillbilly” protest songs recorded during the Depression. A few sharp examples are Ernest Stoneman’s “All I Got Is Gone,” the Bentley Boys’ “Down on Penny’s Farm” (which would influence Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”), Blind Alfred Reed’s “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” (which would be covered by the Del Lords and Bruce Springsteen), the Allen Brothers’ “Price of Cotton Blues,” and the Cofer Brothers’ “Georgia Hobo.” One of the most effective aspects of these songs is that they frequently deny certain kinds of auditory pleasure. They are moving. They are compelling. The instrumentation is impressive, as are the vocal performances. But they are not generally pretty. (Fascinatingly, punk music—which at least in its first generation shared “hillbilly” music’s explicit working-class roots—also denies a certain kind of relaxed beauty. Perhaps this is why some critics have humorously referred to “hillbilly” music’s star Uncle Dave Macon as the original punk rocker.) While the number of country songs about work is staggering, country music’s relationship to labor cannot 114

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adequately be captured as a thematic emphasis. For one thing, as industrial unionism amped up its organizing work in the South, versions of the early “hillbilly” songs were frequently sung on picket lines and used as an organizing tool. The songs of organizers and balladeers Ella Mae Wiggins (who was murdered during the Gastonia Loray Mill Strike in 1929), Sarah Ogan Gunning (whose “I Hate the Capitalist System” remains relevant), and Jim Garland (who produced a veritable soundtrack for the National Miners Union organizing efforts) are foundational examples, although there are many others. This organizing makes literal an important truth about work and country music: it functions as an artistic strategy that continues to separate country from other pop music. The stage name of country singer Johnny Paycheck is a case in point. Paycheck was most known for his 1977 hit version of “Take This Job and Shove It.” Before that, he released two rockabilly singles under the name “Donny Young.” The move from rockabilly to country is paralleled, then, by a name change from “Young” to “Paycheck”—a profound and revelatory shift. Strikingly, on the sheet music for “Take This Job and Shove It,” Paycheck—who cited Haggard as his musical mentor—is pictured (with long and shaggy hair, as it happens) standing among striking workers holding picket signs. The “group autobiographers” of Haggard’s generation not only represented farm or factory work; they chronicled the changes in the kind of work being done by their listening base. Here is where an important country subgenre, that of trucking songs, begins. (There were a few trucking songs scattered 115

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here and there before, but they tended to be humorous and not part of a distinct trend.) Neatly combining Bakersfield country’s focus on travel and on work, the number of country trucking songs released in the 1960s is staggering—enough that Harper’s blamed the truckers’ strike of 1972 on country music. Haggard himself recorded other trucking songs in addition to the Okie album’s “White Line Fever,” including “Truck Driver’s Blues” (which is focused on the driver’s exhaustion) and “Movin’ On” (which presents truck driving not as a job, but as a career—one requiring expertise). By then, the groundwork for this subgenre had been emphatically laid by the likes of Coleman Wilson, Dave Dudley, and Red Sovine, whose careers were defined by trucking songs. Scads of other country singers also recorded trucking songs: Hawkshaw Hawkins, Grandpa Jones, Cowboy Copas, Hylo Brown. In fact, acknowledging the two-directional shaping process of trucking and country music, the liner notes on a 1976 collection of these songs, Radar Blues, claim that “in . . . truck stops the jukebox always has a large selection of country recordings. Usually some of them are about the truck drivers and the big rigs they pull from one end of the continent to the other” (Innes). Some of these songs, such as Dave Dudley’s 1963 “Six Days on the Road,” were covered by numerous non-country artists (Taj Mahal, Johnny Rivers, Jim Croce, George Thorogood, and others) as well as other mainstream country acts and hippie-country acts. And the truck-driving job would be extended to include women in 1968 by Norma Jean’s “Truck Drivin’ Woman.” The huge number of trucking songs is a particularly clear instance of the rearticulation of work songs by postwar 116

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country singers, but there were many other songs in this category involving additional kinds of work that were being done by Haggard’s generation. The 1950s and 1960s saw a burst of songs portraying waitressing, construction, assembly-line  work, secretarial work, repairing machinery, sales jobs, work in steel mills. As the title of a song by bluegrass singer Peter Rowan efficiently puts it, a generation of people off the farms and out of the country was now saying, “Good Morning, Mr. Timeclock.” By definition, country’s obsession with city labor defies “hayseed”—or really, even “country”—particularly given how urban the stock of images that the artists draw on. There’s hardly a country singer of note who doesn’t sing songs about work, with many putting out whole albums organized around this theme. Merle Travis released an album of mining songs, Songs of the Coal Mines, in 1963. Dave Dudley recorded Songs about the Working Man in 1964; on the album, “Steel Worker Blues” jostles against “Farmer’s Prayer.” Charlie Moore and Bill Napier recorded an album they declared was not only about but For All Lonesome Truck Drivers (1976). John Conlee’s 1985 compilation album Songs for the Working Man opens with a number called “Common Man.” The pop-country group Alabama has a 1985 album titled 40-Hour Week; on the cover, they are practically in Village People–level drag: hard hats, overalls, lunchboxes. Similarly, on Dolly Parton’s 1980 album Nine to Five and Other Odd Jobs, the singer is pictured holding the tools of many trades. Parton’s album includes both a song by Woody Guthrie and a version of “House of the Rising Sun,” a song about prostitution. Pointedly including “House of the 117

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Rising Sun” on an album of work songs was a daring move for Parton, although it had been preceded by sympathetic country songs about prostitution by other artists, such as Haggard’s and Smith’s versions of “Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy” (1969), Jeannie C. Riley’s “The Back Side of Dallas” (1969), and Barbara Fairchild’s “She Can’t Give It Away” (1977). As I have noted elsewhere, Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues” joins a folio of country songs that are extremely sophisticated in their theorizing of labor. The thoroughly mainstream group Alabama recorded (in 1985) a song called “40-hour Week (For a Livin’)” that deftly versifies Marx’s theory of surplus labor value by noting that the products of the labor of American workers has greater value than their pay. Keith Whitley took up alienation of labor the same year in “Quittin’ Time,” noting that he’s sick of making whatever hell it is he’s making on the job. Becky Hobbs recalls Engels’s Origin of the Family in “Mama Was a Working Man” (1985) commenting that her single mother worked twice as much as a man—and received half the compensation for it. Norma Jean’s 1967 “Heaven Help the Working Girl” brings up the reality of women’s everyday encounters with what is now known as sexual harassment before the term was circulating. There are also numerous country songs about performing as work, a notion that typical US constructions about music seek to obscure: singing is too frequently supposed to be a gratifying expression of your soul. (I can’t even count the number of times I have been at a show with people who declared about the band afterward, “Well, they were having 118

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fun!”) On an album titled Totally Instrumental—With One Exception, one of Haggard’s albums that includes spoken commentary, Haggard says that he picked cotton long before he picked guitar. And a lot more of it, he adds—making a wonderful and sharp connection. Introducing another song, Haggard chats with Norm Hamlet (his steel guitar player) about their fathers and families picking cotton. He adds a mouth harp to the instrumentation after talking about his father having it in his pocket while picking. Then he recounts hearing a black worker humming the blues as he picked. The music/work overlay on this album is brilliantly and relentlessly enacted. Similarly, introducing a song about a Bakersfield musician on his album Let Me Tell You about a Song, Haggard sharply notes, “Country music is a profession in Bakersfield . . . like all other professions whether it be that of a doctor, or a scientist, or a steady ditch-digger.” Haggard frequently connected music to labor, claiming, for instance, “Songwriting is something I studied like an architect studies his trade” (Foster 16). Pointedly and effectively, he introduces a guitar solo in “Workin’ Man Blues,” by announcing, “Here comes that workin’ man!” It is important to note that Haggard’s conscious treatment of labor is not limited to noble workers with calloused hands who know their place. Class resentment is a living, breathing presence in his songs—which no doubt accounts for a chunk of the disapproval he faced in certain quarters. A piece titled “An Apology for Merle Haggard” in the Harvard Crimson in 1973 acknowledges this dynamic in its fretting about the complications of someone at Harvard appreciating Haggard by finding him not only inoffensive 119

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but also ­noble. “The whole thing,” he admits, “threatens to suggest the let’s-sit-down- and-rub-shoulders-with-thetruck-drivers (they’re so real) syndrome” (Turner). Admiration for Haggard’s musical focus on work and class is likely what led Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine to publish an article about Haggard in 1970, just after the “Okie” splash. Sing Out! was founded in 1950 as a quarterly journal of folk music and folksongs. It had grown out of the mimeographed People’s Songs, a monthly bulletin with that aimed to “create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American people.” The project that began as People’s Songs and gave rise to Sing Out! was launched by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Alan Lomax, Irwin Silber, and Earl Robinson as a way to forge and promote connections between political activism and music. All of the founders were leftist activists; most of them were associated with the Communist Party. This connection between Haggard and left labor activists is fascinating—but there is another, equally fascinating pole in the cluster of meaning here. The interview appeared first in the Atlanta-based countercultural, underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird, founded by members of the Southern Students Organizing Committee, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society. Early photographs reveal that the paper was staffed by both men and women who let their hair grow long and shaggy. Haggard continued to take up the subject of labor and class in dozens of songs through the nearly fifty years he continued to record after the Okie album. Sometimes he did this through tiny, painful vignettes. “If We Make It Through December” (1973), for instance, tells of a father laid off from 120

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factory, who worries about his inability to give his child a real Christmas with gifts. Sometimes he did this through defensive belligerence. “Big City” (1981) refers with disdain to people who are rich enough that they don’t have to work for a living. Delightfully bringing together the two things he is most known for (work songs and “Okie”), a duet Haggard recorded with George Jones in 1982 (“Silver Eagle”) refers to a country musician as telling the stories of everyday working people—and notes that the singers have been smoking pot in order to alter their brains. The song even puts Haggard’s name into the lyrics to make sure it is clear who is smoking pot. Haggard expanded his work song catalogue to invoke the lingering financial crisis and post-NAFTA fallout in the last song he ever recorded, which came out as a single. Making deft economic analysis in the form of a three-line blues song, it claims that the blues of the Great Depression were the same as the blues today. The song is titled “Kern River Blues,” and refers lyrically and sonically to an earlier song of Haggard’s from 1985, “Kern River.” The earlier song is a lament about a lover who has drowned in the river, but the setup refers to the Dust Bowl, to work in oil towns, and, of course, to the many ramifications of loss. Haggard uses the later song to circle back around to these topics, listing the reasons he has Depression-era blues and is leaving town: politicians still lie, the Bakersfield honky-tonks have been closed down, and the river has dried up because of human mistreatment of natural resources. Perhaps for the first time, Haggard sounds old. Kern river has dried up, the honky-tonks are closed, politicians have lied. And Haggard is never coming back.

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Good-bye, Merle: Hag Heads Home

Merle Haggard died on April 6, 2016, from pneumonia. When the news broke, as it happens, I was on an airplane headed to California to give a talk about the counterculture. I immediately put on headphones to listen to Haggard’s 2004 song, “The Okie from Muskogee’s Comin’ Home.” Although most people are polite when someone dies, the range of immediate responses to Haggard’s death points to the messiness of his reputation up until the end. In obituaries, he was widely hailed as the “poet of the working man” and one of the greatest country songwriters. But that was not the full story still being told about Haggard: in his death as in his life, he took swift punches from both the left and the right. Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on her self-named blog how glad she was that he’d died, because he was an “anti-war, anti-troops, leftist Obama fan.” Many commenters on the piece thanked her for pointing that out. Schlussel refers gleefully to the beating Haggard took from the right for telling a Rolling Stone interviewer in 2010, “It’s criminal what they are doing to our president.” And she is right: he did take a beating. He was also bashed for writing a song opposing the Iraq War, and one about Hillary Clinton’s

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first presidential bid that declared, “What we need is a big switch of gender. Let’s put a woman in charge.” Pretty much simultaneously with Schlussel’s attack, Jacobin, which rather smugly calls itself the “leading voice of the American left,” published a piece by Jonah Walters that maintains that Haggard was a “run-of-the-mill conservative” and that there were “precious few lyrics in his songbook worth defending.” The author of the piece goes on to offer class-based contempt for country music in general, insisting, for instance, that women in country “only existed to break hearts and be heartbroken (generally in lonesome, smalltown diners).” In fact, women in small diners in country songs are usually presented as laborers, working long hours on their feet.1 Walters could learn something by reading Deena Shanker’s instructive piece in Salon, “Country Music Has Always Been Feminist, Even if Taylor Swift Isn’t,” stat. Further, Walters insists, country music “is untroubled by

Examples of this are plentiful (as are examples of country songs about other working women). This list is off the top of my head: Norma Jean’s “Heaven Help the Working Girl” (1968), Hank Williams Jr.’s “Waiting on the Tables to Turn” (1992), Don Williams’s “Maggie’s Dream” (1984), Kris Kristofferson’s “Here Comes That Rainbow Again” (1982; this song also mentions Okies and truckers), Marty Stuart’s “Truckstop” (1999), Hayes Carll’s “Girl Downtown” (2008), Charley Pride, “The Chain of Love” (2003), Bobby Bare’s “Rosalie’s Good Eats Café” (1973), Rick Trevino’s “Mary’s Just a Plain Jane” (1996), Glen Campbell’s “Manhattan, Kansas” (1972), Alabama’s “40 Hour Week” (1986), Tim McGraw’s “Beautiful People” (2006), Colin Raye’s “Little Red Rodeo (1997), Faith Hill’s “A Man’s Home Is His Castle” (1995), Billy Ray Cyrus’s “We the People” (2000), Chris LeDoux’s “Working Man’s Dollar” (1991). 1 

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the presence of non-whites.” This is a naïve, history-is-onlyin-the-lyrics approach; the sounds and instrumentation and influences of country music generally, and Haggard’s songbook in particular, give the lie to it. But the lyrics do, too. Haggard, who has a song about the son of a former slave not getting noticed enough by well-off white people, makes that literally wrong as the song is troubled by the lack of presence in privileged people’s consciousness of non-whites. Other explicitly antiracist, totally middle-of-the-road country songs from Haggard’s generation include Henson Cargill’s “Skip a Rope” (1967), Tommy Cash’s “Six White Horses” (1969), Tom T. Hall’s “I Want to See the Parade” (1971) and “The Man Who Hated Freckles” (1973), Tanya Tucker’s “I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again” (1973)—with racial justice, Tucker predicts, pointing to class-based solidarity with neighbors who were black. The important African American country singer Stoney Edwards had already expressed this sentiment in his 1971 song, “Poor Folks Stick Together.” And the way musicians worked around the profiteering recording industry’s enforced separation of “hillbilly” music and “race” music is quite heartening and audible through, for instance, numerous soul and blues covers of country songs. Wrong or right, various readings of “Okie” dogged Haggard for the rest of his life—as did his practical, industrymandated need not to contradict any readings that were responsible for his success. But over the years, Haggard spoke more and more openly about having his career dominated by a joke. In a 2002 piece in which he sharply criticizes President Bush, Haggard remarks, “[‘Okie From Muskogee’] nearly stopped my career. They were beginning to play me 125

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on rock stations, and it stopped all that. A lot of people who analyzed my career said that song was probably a mistake. But Willie Nelson said, ‘Hey, if you don’t want the son of a bitch, I’ll trade you “Crazy” for it!’” (Ruggles). Having made this laughing-to-keep-from-crying joke, Haggard continued, “If I was to do it over again, it would take a lot more thought. I thought it was funny. The song was humorous. It was like the epitome of the ignorance on certain subjects. But I’ll be damned if people like Wallace and Nixon didn't take it for the truth. It makes me wonder what kind of politicians we’ve got in [Washington] now. Do they have the same mentality as they did during the days of ‘Okie from Muskogee’?” Two years later, Haggard would receive a deluge of positive and negative attention for writing a piece defending the Texas-based country act the Dixie Chicks’ anti–Iraq War comments—though tellingly, many observers obstinately hewed to the old Haggard line as though this defense had somehow not happened. For instance, limousine-liberal novelist Ann Patchett, writing in the New York Times about that very controversy, used Haggard as a standard of country music’s obsessive conservatism—the only subject it engages, she wrote, besides going to a seedy bar to try to get laid. Haggard’s desire to transcend these categories dogged him all his life. An interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune was organized around a heartbreaking comment Haggard made: “It has never been fun” being Merle Haggard (Bream). Even more poignant for this moment (shortly before Haggard’s death)—and equally demonstrative of Haggard’s longing not to be boxed in—was his response to a question about what he’d like to have included in his obituary. Haggard replied, 126

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“I’d like it to say: ‘He was the greatest jazz guitar player in the world that loved to play country’” (Bream). The productive, complicated nature of Haggard’s reputation is nowhere captured better than by Nashville comics artist Eric Powell early in his series The Goon. A repeatedly appearing character named “Merle” comes across at first as a country bumpkin. But it turns out that Merle is actually a werewolf—and not one who is a slave to the moon. Merle is in control of his transformation, and the “redneck” identity is a mask. In fact, Merle is a hero.

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Don West epigraph is taken from In a Land of Plenty: A Don West Reader; the copyright page reads, “Purposely this book is not copyrighted. Poetry and other creative efforts should be levers, Weapons to be used in the people’s struggle for understanding, human rights, and decency…Thus, no copyright, no effort to restrict use. Groups or individuals are welcome to reproduce or use any or all parts of this book.” Tommy Collins epigraph is taken with permission from Dave Vinicur’s “Untamed Hawk,” published in booklet accompanying the Bear Family Record’s 1995 collection Untamed Hawk: The Early Recordings of Merle Haggard. Excerpt from THE GRAPES OF WRATH: 75TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION by John Steinbeck, copyright © 1939, renewed © 1967 by John Steinbeck. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Rose Maddox epigraph is taken with permission from Gerald Haslan’s Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California. © 1999 by Gerald Haslan.

P E R M I S SIO N S

All Louis Zukofsky materials copyright © Musical Observations, Inc. Used by permission. Okie From Muskogee Words and Music by Merle Haggard and Roy Edward Burris Copyright (c) 1969 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC Hungry Eyes Words and Music by Merle Haggard Copyright (c) 1969 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC They're Tearing the Labor Camps Down Words and Music by Merle Haggard Copyright (c) 1973 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC Workin' Man Blues Words and Music by Merle Haggard Copyright (c) 1969 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

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Copyright Renewed All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC Gimme Three Steps Words and Music by Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant Copyright (c) 1973, 1976 SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC. Copyrights Renewed All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC Detroit City Words and Music by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis Copyright © 1963 UNIVERSAL - CEDARWOOD PUBLISHING Copyright Renewed All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

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Also available in the series

Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 1.

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder

ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris

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ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

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ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti's Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Worbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Cough 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay

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