The song that once roiled America is 40 years old

By ROBERT PRICE

Merle Haggard must occasionally hear that drunk guy in his sleep. More than a few times in his long and fruitful career, the Bakersfield-born singer has been on stage, warbling in his fine baritone, when some yokel in the back bellows, “Play ‘Okie’!”

And, more often than not, Haggard, writer of hundreds of gentle and poignant jazz-country ballads, will — dare I suggest reluctantly? — oblige. Sometimes Haggard’s most famous, profitable and career-solidifying song, the one that expressed disgust with smoking marijuana, burning draft cards and those “hippies out in San Francisco,” must seem like an insufferable relative who just doesn’t know when to go home.

Forty years ago today, “Okie From Muskogee” was at the peak of its power, smack dab in the middle of a four-week run at No. 1 on the country music charts. In the span of those few weeks, Haggard cemented himself in the top tier of American entertainers.

But looking back now on “Okie,” the populist anthem Haggard has said he wrote in 10 minutes, it’s clear the song was much more than that: It was, and remains, a signpost on America’s difficult and unfulfilled journey toward self-identity.

Almost immediately upon the song’s ascent to No. 1 in November 1969, “Okie From Muskogee” was regaled as the voice of the silent majority, a revitalizing tonic for conservatives who had grown defensive and angry over Vietnam and the counter-culture movement it had helped spawn.

Of course, Haggard had been covertly political for most of his career, so covert perhaps Haggard did not fully realize it himself. “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” “Hungry Eyes” and “Workin’ Man Blues,” among others, had already firmly positioned Haggard as a man with working-class, anti-elite, populist sentiments. To a great extent, “Okie” tracked that same course.

Sociologists, historians and assorted pundits (including cultural historian and former Californian reporter Peter LaChapelle, author of 2007’s “Proud to be an Okie”) have long debated the song’s meaning and intent. Was it a parody or a sincerely indignant jab at the LSD-tripping left? At various times, Haggard has suggested both.

Haggard had no inkling what he’d created until he played the song publicly for the first time: His unveiling, at a club for noncommissioned Army officers in Fort Bragg, N.C., inspired a response so passionately rowdy that Haggard, then 32, later admitted he’d momentarily feared for his life.

The song, recorded in Hollywood on July 17 and released in August, made Haggard one of the hottest concert commodities in the country. The Atlantic Monthly described one scene on Dayton, Ohio: “… Suddenly they are on their feet, berserk, waving flags and stomping and whistling and cheering … and for those brief moments the majority isn’t silent anymore.” As a single, the song sold 264,000 copies the first year, propelling Haggard to 1970 entertainer of the year awards from both the Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association.

Some critics decried the song’s ultraconservatism; others tried to rehabilitate the song by reading it as a populist, working-class assault on middle-class snobbery and elitism. It became perhaps the most parodied songs of the Vietnam era, inspiring left-of-center knockoffs by Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys (“Asshole From El Paso”), Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, and Arlo Guthrie. So many country, rock and country-rock groups released transmogrified versions of “Okie” that Rolling Stone magazine kept score: As of March 1971, the song had been recorded 20 times, with the tally standing at “Honkies, 12, Hippies, 8.”

In the context of Haggard’s lifelong body of work, it’s clear that when Haggard saw protesting college students, he didn’t just see disrespect for flag and country, he saw class distinction and privilege. He saw trust-fund snot-noses who’d never stooped over a row of cotton in their lives, never seen dirt under their own fingernails. The marijuana was one thing — and maybe not such a big thing at that — but the naïveté was quite another. If the literal weight of the lyrics was an indication, the song was less about Vietnam than about class dignity. After all, “I’m proud to be an Okie” is the song’s most repeated line.

Eventually Haggard began expressing misgivings about the song’s tendency to brand him a reactionary, preferring to explain it simply as a statement of Okie pride. When Haggard spoke at the “Oildale and Beyond” history symposium at Cal State Bakersfield Nov. 7, that was the interpretation he shared.

But conservative politicians identified a natural constituency in country music fans, and their efforts to exploit it during the Vietnam era featured Merle Haggard.

Sometimes Haggard allowed it: He of course gratefully accepted Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1970 pardon for crimes that eventually led to his incarceration at San Quentin Prison in the late 1950s. And he accepted Richard Nixon’s invitation to the White House in 1973 to sing at wife Pat’s staid birthday party. But Haggard refused to endorse George Wallace when the Alabama governor and presidential aspirant — who was already campaigning with country-music singers singers Ernest Tubb and Marty Robbins — asked for his support in 1972. Years later he rejected similar overtures from one-time U.S. Senate candidate David Duke, the ex-Klansman.

Eventually Haggard came to the conclusion that protest “wasn’t un-American” after all. Those young Vietnam-era protesters, he told interviewer Deke Dickerson, could “see through our bigotry and our hypocrisy. ... I believe history has proven them right.”

By 2007, Haggard had moved to the center-left, if his salute to then-presidential candidate (and longtime conservative target) Hillary Clinton was an indication: “This country needs to be honest; Changes need to be large; Something like a big switch of gender; Let’s put a woman in charge.”

But Haggard has never cared much for labels. Try to put a liberal pin on his lapel and risk that scowl. Maybe his political soul is best revealed in a lesser-known song, “Somewhere in Between,” recorded a short time after “Okie” but never released: “I stand looking at the left wing, and I turn towards the right; And either side don’t look too good, examined under light; That’s just freedom of opinion, and their legal right to choose; That’s one right I hope we never lose.”