Okie from Muskogee

Okie from Muskogee is a live album by Merle Haggard and the Strangers released in October 1969 on Capitol Records.

Background

The album was a recorded performance at the Civic Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma on October 10, 1969, the day before the studio version of "Okie from Muskogee" hit the national country charts.

In the documentary Beyond Nashville, Haggard claims the song, which he wrote with drummer Eddie Burris on his bus, was more of a wistful tribute to his late father than any kind of political statement: "My dad passed away when I was nine, and I don't know if you've ever thought about somebody you've lost and you say, 'I wonder what so-and-so would think about this?' I was drivin' on Interstate 40 and I saw a sign that said "19 Miles to Muskogee." Muskogee was always referred to in my childhood as 'back home.' So I saw that sign and my whole childhood flashed before my eyes and I thought, 'I wonder what dad would think about the youthful uprising that was occurring at the time, the Janis Joplins...I understood 'em, I got a long with it, but what if he was to come alive at this moment? And I thought, what a way to describe the kind of people in America that are still sittin' in the center of the country sayin', 'What is goin' on on these campuses?'" In the American Masters episode about his life and career, however, a more defiant Haggard states that the song was more than a satire: "That's how I got into it with the hippies...I thought they were unqualified to judge America, and I thought they were lookin' down their noses at something that I cherished very much, and it pissed me off. And I thought, 'You sons of bitches, you've never been restricted away from this great, wonderful country, and yet here you are in the streets bitchin' about things, protesting about a war that they didn't know anymore about than I did. They weren't over there fightin' that war anymore than I was."

Merle Haggard

Merle Ronald Haggard (born April 6, 1937) is an American country and Western songwriter, singer, guitarist, fiddler, and instrumentalist. Along with Buck Owens, Haggard and his band The Strangers helped create the Bakersfield sound, which is characterized by the unique twang of Fender Telecaster and the unique mix with the traditional country steel guitar sound, new vocal harmony styles in which the words are minimal, and a rough edge not heard on the more polished Nashville sound recordings of the same era.

By the 1970s, Haggard was aligned with the growing outlaw country movement, and has continued to release successful albums through the 1990s and into the 2000s. In 1994, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1997, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.

Early life

Haggard's parents, Flossie Mae Harp and James Francis Haggard, moved to California from their home in Checotah, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression, after their barn burned in 1934. They settled with their children, Lowell and Lillian, in an apartment in Bakersfield, while James Francis Haggard started working for the Santa Fe Railroad. A woman who owned a boxcar, which was placed in Oildale, a nearby town north of Bakersfield, asked Haggard's father about the possibility of converting it into a house. He remodeled the boxcar, and soon after moved in, also purchasing the lot, where Merle Ronald Haggard was born on April 6, 1937. The property was eventually expanded by building a bathroom, a second bedroom, a kitchen and a breakfast nook in the adjacent lot.

Okie

An Okie is a resident or native of Oklahoma. Like most terms that disparage specific groups, it was applied by the dominant cultural group. It is derived from the name of the state, similar to Texan or Tex for someone from Texas, or Arkie or Arkansawyer for a native of Arkansas.

In the 1930s in California, the term (often used in contempt) came to refer to very poor migrants from Oklahoma (and nearby states). The Dust Bowl, and the "Okie" migration of the 1930s brought in over a million newly displaced people; many headed to the farm labor jobs advertised in California's Central Valley.

Dunbar-Ortiz (1996) argues that 'Okie' denotes much more than being from Oklahoma. By 1950, four million individuals, or one quarter of all persons born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, or Missouri, lived outside the region, primarily in the West. Prominent Okies in the 1930s included Woody Guthrie. Most prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s were country musician Merle Haggard and writer Gerald Haslam.

Merle

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Haggard

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