Rubin - Merle Haggards Okie From Muskogee

OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE

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Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin

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Okie from Muskogee: Recorded Live
in Muskogee, Oklahoma - Merle Haggard

Okie from Muskogee

Rachel Lee Rubin

Contents

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 gratefuland want to call attentionto 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.

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 Years 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 Cashs 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 Cashs 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)

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 leavean 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 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 Reids 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 Lets 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) doesnt enter into it with Cashjust with Haggard.

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. Haggards most famous song, Okie from Muskogee, is an excellent case study of this. The songa bit noveltyish, a bit of a jokecould 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 Haggards 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 Haggards 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 Haggards patriotic chore.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 theyve 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.