Merle Haggard was born on 6 April 1937, in a converted boxcar in Oildale, California, near Bakersfield, where his family had migrated from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years. His father died when Merle was nine, and the boy who grew up in that boxcar grew up fast and hard. He ran away, got into trouble, spent time in reform schools, and, at twenty, was sent to San Quentin prison for burglary. He served nearly three years there, from 1958 to 1960. In prison he heard Johnny Cash perform, and the experience, as Haggard told it for the rest of his life, helped turn him toward music as a way out. When he was released, he went back to Bakersfield, where a new kind of country music was being made: loud, electric, stripped of Nashville’s strings, built around the Telecaster guitar and the working-class dance hall. Haggard, with his prison record, his plain voice, and his gift for writing about the lives of people like himself, became one of that sound’s defining artists.
The Bakersfield sound, as it came to be called, was in part a reaction against Nashville. Where Nashville in the 1960s was smoothing country music with orchestras and choruses, Bakersfield kept the beat hard, the guitars bright, and the lyrics close to the lives of migrants, oil workers, farm hands, and ex-prisoners. Buck Owens was its first great star, and Haggard, a decade younger, became its conscience. His early hits were portraits, not slogans: “Mama Tried” (1968), about a mother who tried to raise a wild son and could not save him from himself, was widely understood to be drawn from his own life, and it became one of the most beloved country records of its era. “Sing Me Back Home” (1967), about a prisoner asking a guitar player for one last song before execution, was another. Haggard sang these songs without self-pity and without apology. His voice, a baritone with a slight catch in it, sounded like a man who had seen the inside of the institutions he sang about and had come out the other side with his dignity intact.
A song written on a tour bus
“Okie from Muskogee” began, by Haggard’s own account, as a joke. In 1969, travelling on his tour bus with his band, the Strangers, Haggard and his drummer, Roy Edward Burris, began trading lines about Muskogee, Oklahoma, a small town they had passed through, imagining the kind of place where people still lived by old rules while the rest of the country seemed to be coming apart. The country in 1969 was, in fact, coming apart in public: the Vietnam War, campus protests, the counterculture, the generation gap, and the nightly news all fed a sense that two Americas were shouting at each other. Haggard’s joke was to imagine the other America, the small-town America, answering back. The lines they traded became a song, with Haggard credited as the writer alongside Burris, and the band began playing it live. The response was immediate and startling. Audiences, especially audiences that included servicemen and working-class listeners, reacted as if someone had finally said what they felt.
The record, released in September 1969, went to number one on the country chart. It won the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year award in 1970, and the album of the same name won Album of the Year. The song’s lyric lists, in plain terms, the things Muskogee’s people supposedly do not do: they do not smoke marijuana, they do not burn their draft cards, they do not grow their hair long, they still respect the flag and the college dean. It ends with a declaration of pride in being an “Okie from Muskogee.” Taken literally, the lyric is a catalogue of conservative small-town virtues set against the counterculture. Taken as Haggard later insisted it should sometimes be taken, it was also a piece of humour, a tall tale told by a man who had himself been an outlaw, a prisoner, and a drifter, and who knew perfectly well that small towns were not as simple as the song made them sound. Haggard spent years explaining, qualifying, and sometimes contradicting himself about the song, and that long afterlife of explanation is itself part of the record’s history.
The anthem and the argument
The argument about “Okie from Muskogee” was, in its way, as fierce as the argument about any song of its era. Supporters heard it as a defence of ordinary people who felt mocked and ignored by the culture around them: farmers, soldiers, factory workers, and small-town families who loved their country and did not recognise themselves in the protests on television. For those listeners, the song was not an attack on young people; it was a claim to dignity, a statement that their way of life counted. Critics heard it as a sneer at protest, at dissent, and at a generation trying to end a war, and they pointed out that Haggard himself, an ex-prisoner who had sung sympathetically about outlaws and drifters, was an odd spokesman for respectability. Both readings found support in Haggard’s own words at different times. In some interviews he embraced the song as a sincere statement. In others he said it was written with a sense of humour, that he had been a hippie in his own way, and that he admired some of the very people the song seemed to criticise. He even recorded, years later, songs that took a more sympathetic view of marijuana and of outsiders, which his critics noted with satisfaction and his supporters noted with discomfort.
What is certain is that the song changed Haggard’s career. Before it, he was a respected country singer with a growing audience. After it, he was a national figure, interviewed about politics as well as music, invited to play for audiences far beyond the country world, and identified, fairly or not, with a political position. The identification brought him a large and loyal audience, and it also brought him a label he sometimes resisted. Haggard was, by temperament, a complicated man: a patriot who had served time, a traditionalist who loved jazz and western swing, a working-class hero who read widely and wrote songs of great tenderness. The label of “Okie” both helped and trapped him, and he spent the next forty years making records that proved he was larger than any one song. Albums such as “Mama Tried,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me” (1970, itself a response to the controversy), and later, quieter records about ageing, work, and family, all showed a songwriter who refused to be reduced to a slogan.
Bakersfield, prison, and the working man
To understand Haggard apart from the controversy, it helps to return to Bakersfield. The Bakersfield sound was not a marketing idea; it was the sound of a place. Migrants from Oklahoma and Texas had brought their music to California’s Central Valley, and in the dance halls of Bakersfield they wanted music they could dance to, loud enough to be heard over a crowd, honest enough to be believed. Haggard’s band, the Strangers, with Roy Nichols on guitar and Norman Hamlet on steel guitar, played that music with a precision and a swing that Nashville session players envied. Haggard’s own guitar playing, often overlooked because his singing and writing were so strong, was part of the sound: clean, economical, and rooted in the styles of Bob Wills and the western swing bands he loved as a boy. When he sang about work, he sang about work he knew. His father had been a railroad worker and a carpenter before the family moved west; Haggard himself had worked in the oil fields and on farms. The authority in his voice came from that knowledge, not from posture.
Prison, too, remained in his work long after San Quentin. Haggard never romanticised prison, and he never pretended it had not happened. Songs such as “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” and “Branded Man” (1967), about an ex-prisoner who cannot escape his past, return to the same questions: what does a man owe for what he has done, and can he ever be free of it? Haggard’s answer, in song after song, was neither simple forgiveness nor simple punishment. It was that a man lives with his past and tries, day by day, to live better. That moral seriousness is what separates his best work from mere nostalgia. It is also what makes “Okie from Muskogee” more interesting than its critics sometimes allow. The man who wrote it had been on the wrong side of the law, had been locked up, and had been given a second chance. When he sang about pride in a small town, he was singing, in part, about the pride of a man who had rebuilt a life and did not want it mocked.
The long career after the anthem
Haggard kept recording and touring for more than four decades after “Okie from Muskogee.” He had dozens of number-one country singles, he recorded duets with Willie Nelson, George Jones, and others, and he became an elder statesman of country music, honoured by the Kennedy Center in 2010 and elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994. He also kept writing songs that surprised people who thought they knew him: songs about the environment, about the poor, about soldiers returning from later wars, and about his own mortality. His late albums, recorded when his voice had deepened and slowed, have a plainspoken gravity that many critics consider among his finest work. He toured until shortly before his death, often playing with his son Ben on guitar, and he died on 6 April 2016, his seventy-ninth birthday, at his home in California. The obituaries, inevitably, mentioned “Okie from Muskogee” in the first paragraph, and they also mentioned San Quentin, “Mama Tried,” and the Bakersfield sound, because by then the full story was too large for one song to contain.
That is, in the end, the right way to hear “Okie from Muskogee.” It is a remarkable record: a joke that became an anthem, an anthem that became an argument, and an argument that never quite ended. But it is one record in a catalogue of hundreds, written by a man whose life gave him the right to sing about outlaws and working men, about mothers and prisoners, about small towns and the wider world, with equal authority. Haggard himself, in his later years, seemed to accept the song’s place without letting it define him. He sang it when audiences asked for it, and he sang it straight, without apology and without winking. A song that can be heard as a joke, as a protest, as a defence, and as a piece of autobiography, all at once, is a rarer thing than a simple anthem or a simple joke. It is a mirror, and the argument about it has always been, in part, an argument about who gets to look in it and what they see.
Haggard the songwriter: prison songs, working songs, and winter songs
Beyond the anthem, Haggard’s songwriting returns, again and again, to three subjects: prison, work, and family, and his best songs on each subject are among the finest in country music. “Branded Man” (1967) tells the story of an ex-prisoner who finds that, wherever he goes, people see the mark of his past before they see the man himself. The song does not ask for pity. It asks for a fair hearing, and it ends, as Haggard’s prison songs often do, not with a resolution but with a man still walking, still trying. “Mama Tried” (1968) is, in a sense, the companion piece: a son’s apology to a mother who did everything she could and still could not keep him out of trouble. The song’s famous opening, about a mother turning twenty-one in prison, is drawn from Haggard’s own family history — his mother did, in fact, visit him in prison — and the record’s power comes from the fact that the apology is offered without excuse. The son does not blame his mother, his town, or his luck. He blames himself, and the blame, sung plainly, is more moving than any protest would have been.
The working songs are equally plain and equally strong. “Workin’ Man Blues” (1969), recorded in the same year as “Okie from Muskogee,” celebrates a man who drinks, works, and plays in a band on weekends, and it became an anthem for working listeners in its own right, without the controversy of its more famous neighbour. “If We Make It Through December” (1973), written by Haggard about a factory worker laid off before Christmas, is one of the saddest and most humane songs in country music, because it refuses to offer a happy ending. The worker in the song does not know if he will make it through December. He hopes he will, and the hope, not the certainty, is the point. “The Fightin’ Side of Me” (1970), recorded as a direct response to the “Okie” controversy, is a harder, more combative record, in which Haggard tells critics of his country to leave if they do not love it. Heard today, it sounds like a man doubling down, but it also sounds like a man who felt cornered by an argument he had not fully chosen, and who answered it the only way he knew how: with a song.
Haggard’s later work, from the 1980s onward, is quieter and, in some ways, more revealing. Songs about ageing, about his children, about the death of friends, and about the changing country he had sung about for decades, show a songwriter who had outlived his own legend and who was content to write about smaller, truer things. He recorded with his son Noel and his son Ben, he toured with a band that included family members, and he became, in his seventies, a figure of immense respect among younger country and Americana singers, who cited him as a model of independence. He never signed away his publishing lightly, he recorded what he wanted, and he kept the Bakersfield sound alive long after Nashville had moved on. That independence, learned in prison and in dance halls, is Haggard’s real legacy, and it is larger than any single song, even one as large as “Okie from Muskogee.”
Sources
- Merle Haggard, My House of Memories (autobiography, 1999, with Tom Carter)
- Country Music Association awards history for “Okie from Muskogee” (1970)
- Country Music Hall of Fame biography of Merle Haggard
- Billboard chart history for “Okie from Muskogee” (1969)
- Contemporary interviews with Merle Haggard on the writing of “Okie from Muskogee” and its reception
Image credit: Image: Brett Sayles via Pexels, free licence (thematic electric guitar on stage, not a photograph of Merle Haggard).
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