(December, 2017. It turns out that a year ago, I was so disoriented by the election and administration-elect (like most Americans) that, while I had drafted this post as a break from those obsessions, I forgot to post it. [Jay Livingstone points out that I did post this a year ago. Oh, well, a different sign of that time’s distraction. As I wrote then:] “Meanwhile, for something that’s totally different … or maybe not.”)
In 1969, singer-songwriter Merle Haggard, who died this year [2016] at 79, had a country music hit which also won the Country Music Association song of the year award: “Okie From Muskogee.” “Okie” became the Vietnam-era anthem for millions of “Silent Majority” Americans who resented the insult to their ways of life they saw in the antics of 1960s anti-war protesters and do-your-thing hippies.
We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don’t take no trips on LSD / We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street / We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.
Merle Haggard, then
Haggard would later tell conflicting stories about the song that largely defined his career. At various times, he described it as a joke, a satire, a defense of his Okie father, and a justified rebuke to young kids who were bitching about America while soldiers were dying for their freedom to bitch. “I wrote the song to support those soldiers,” he once said. “I thought about them [hippies] looking down their noses at something I cherished very much and it pissed me off,” he said more recently. Though celebrated at the Nixon White House in 1973, by the end of his career Haggard was, in sharp contrast, performing for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In 2010, he said, “I’ve learned the truth since I wrote that song. I play it now with a different projection.” And he regretted, according to Rolling Stone, being seen as the “Poet Laureate of Pissed-Off White People” (see here, here, here).
Whatever Haggard’s intentions and regrets, the song became bigger than he. Country music audiences demanded it and cheered its flag-waving defense of Middle America. Many fans whose closest connection to rural America was wearing cowboy boots nonetheless saw themselves as culturally country and Haggard as their champion.
That was almost 50 years ago. Today, “Okie From Muskogee” also serves to tell us something about change in the parts of America that Muskogee represented.
Changes
We don’t make a party out of lovin’ / We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo / We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy / Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.
Marijuana (and other drugs), sexual license, law-breaking resistance, and shaggy hair – they’ve come to country America.
In the 1970s, only one in seven rural and small-town Americans told the General Social Survey that use of marijuana should be legal; in the 2010s, almost half did.[1] More critically, what appears to be a “drug epidemic” in rural regions (see, e.g., here and here) became a political issue in the 2016 election, with Donald Trump promising to solve it. Haggard acknowledged drinking in Muskogee (We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse / And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all), but 2016’s County Music Association vocalist of the year Chris Stapleton sings about getting “stoned” and rolling joints (I got friends that know how to have a good time / Yeah they roll their own and drink Carolina shine – “Outlaw State of Mind”).
As to sex: Even as teen births, including births to unwed teens, have been dropping nationwide, they have been doing so more slowly in rural areas, such that those rates are now higher there than in urban areas (see this, this, and that). Attitudes have changed. In the 1970s, fewer than one-third of rural and small-town Americans told the GSS that premarital sex was “not wrong at all”; in the 2010s, almost half do.[2]
Country folks aren’t burning draft cards, to be sure, but some rural activists have been thumbing their noses at the federal government in other ways, such as taking over federal land (e.g., here; here). ….. Oh, and the shaggy hair:
Chris Stapleton
Merle Haggard, 2010s
Moral
The moral of this story is not that an old Bay Area liberal can score political “gotchas” decades after ‘60s. It is rather to point out the pervasive force of cultural change. What seemed like eternal differences between city and country in one period, blatant enough to be recognized and celebrated in short lyrics, look a lot different a generation or two later as cultural beliefs and practices changed, the changes commonly spreading from urban to rural. Not everything changes, of course. I suspect that flag-waving is still more common in the Muskogees than in the San Franciscos of America and this lyric may still stand true: Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear / Beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen. Also, new cultural differences between city and country can emerge–say, views over gay marriage in the 2010s. But the striking fact is how so many of the life-ways that “Okie” described as distinctive of those city folks came were adopted by country folk.
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– Notes —
[1] My analysis of the GSS, defining “country” as towns under 10,000 plus open countryside [XNORCSIZ]. In the 1970s, there was a 15-point gap between residents of these places and the rest of the nation on legalizing marijuana; the 2010s gap is 5 points.
[2] In the 1970s, there was a 15-point gap between residents of small and rural places and the rest of the nation on seeing nothing wrong with premarital sex; the 2010s gap is 8 points.
