The American pop-music establishment has sunk to a weird new nadir of escapism. The evidence was broadcast Sunday night on CBS. A pair of French dance-music DJs who pretend to be cyborgs, the helmet-human hybrid Daft Punk, won the Grammy Awards for Record & Album of the Year. Those pretentious pranksters refused to show their faces or even speak a single word (in any language) as they accepted the trophies. Fortunately, there were a couple moments that almost redeemed this alienating Hypefest. And both of them featured country artists.
The first saving grace: Kacey Musgraves's lovely performance of "Follow Your Arrow," a country-pop song that actually has some substance & bite to it. I'm glad she won the Best Country Album (for Same Trailer Different Park) & Best Country Song ("Merry Go Round") awards. Musgraves's gentle composure was a welcome contrast to, say, Pink's strained aerial acrobat act. And don't get me started on that bizarre group wedding, conducted by ex-rapper Queen Latifah & blessed by a cane-wielding Madonna. Look, I too support marriage equality. But I cannot endorse using cult gimmicks to score political points on national TV. I mean, are these the Grammies or the Moonies?
The second act of contrition: the appearance of 76-year-old Merle Haggard during a medley of "outlaw country" songs. That nostalgic detour into humane musical territory opened with sage-angel Willie Nelson dueting with the atonal Kris Kristofferson on "The Highwaymen." They were soon joined by Mr. Haggard & Blake Shelton, a bland young stand-in for the late Johnny Cash, whom Hag first heard onstage at San Quentin prison (New Year's Day 1959). How touching to see the grizzled Merle play guitar while singing his 1969 classic "Okie from Muskogee"! The opening lines - "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don't take our trips on LSD" - included the first street-drug references ever in a chart-topping country song (aside from amphetamine pills, the trucker's little helper).
To witness joy on the jaded faces of several stars in the audience as they sang along with Merle ("like the hippies out in San Francisco do") was a refreshing bonus. But I wonder how many people at the show in LA - let alone viewers at home across the USA - knew that Merle's Okie paean is actually a shit-kicking satire? In what music critic David Cantwell calls the Muskogee Moment (see his insightful book Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, University of Texas Press, 2013), Hag's "Okie from Muskogee" ignited a firestorm of controversy. It was a sociopolitical phenomenon in the fall of '69, arguably the first shot in the culture wars that still divide the United States. But the whole mess started as a harmless joke. It's a good story, so bear with me.
The genesis of Merle's bestselling composition occurred on a tour bus in eastern Oklahoma in the spring of '69. Haggard & the Strangers, his Californina-based backing band, were passing around a joint when the bus approached a sign saying Muskogee 30 miles. "I bet they don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," one of the guys quipped. Stoned & giddy, the bandmates proceeded to riff on this theme, tossing out other taboos that small-town folks of that era wouldn't dare break: dropping acid, organizing orgies, protesting anything. "I bet they don't do that in Muskogee neither." Since they all had working-class roots in hick towns, the jokes bore no malice.
But Hag had an epiphany. The Haggard family had migrated from Oklahoma to Merle's birthplace - Bakersfield, California - during the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster. Now he - along with co-writer Roy Burris - turned his band's cannabis-fueled highway gag into a song that simultaneously managed (1) to express his pride in being kin to those once maligned migrants (signs in WWII-era Bakersfield cinemas directed "Negroes & Okies" to the balcony), while (2) poking fun at the patriotic provincialism of small towns. Adding to the irony, Haggard told a reporter in the early '70s, Muskogee was about the only place he hadn't smoked dope.
A gifted artist whose best early hits (from "Hungry Eyes" to "Workin' Man Blues" & "Mama Tried") exude a poetic pessimism, Haggard was able to craft deceptively simple lines. For "Okie from Muskogee" he wrote: "We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse" & "We like living right and being free." In the recording studio he sang those lines in such a sincere baritone that only careful listeners could get the subversive subtext. Radical folkie Phil Ochs was hip to the trick. On his live Gunfight at Carnegie Hall album (1970), Ochs praises Haggard to a sceptical crowd before launching into a raucous electric interpretation of "Okie from Muskogee". The lyrics' clever ambiguity makes you stop and think: Wait a second, how can you be free when you're concerned about living right in the eyes of your neighbors?
The song insinuates that hippies & anti-war demonstrators might, in fact, not be the enemies of decency & democracy. The threat might actually come from the intolerant, sanctimonious citizens of Muskogee - those for whom "white lightning's still the biggest thrill of all." Dick Nixon called them the Silent Majority, his racist ticket to the White House. It took a restless ex-felon like Haggard to damn Muskogee with fake praise, offering a wise-ass backhanded compliment to "a place where even squares can have a ball."
Nevertheless, the yokels - including Hooterville chambers of commerce, backslapping Rotarians & pro-Vietnam War diehards - ate up the cornpone part of the message. But many others, including some of the emerging country rockers (e.g. Gram Parsons) who idolized Hag, were either confused or angered by it. "Okie from Muskogee" was a minor crossover pop hit, nearly making Haggard a household name. He'd suddenly become a populist folk hero to right-wingers. The song even paid legal dividends: Gov. Ronald Reagan pardoned Merle, a convicted burglar & car thief, in 1972.
To his shame, Haggard engaged in some verbal hippie-bashing during press interviews in the wake of this career breakthrough. He mainly objected to barefooted, longhaired freaks' allegedly poor hygiene. Merle was understandably reluctant to bite the (square) hands that were feeding him. Yet, to his credit, he never denied that the song was essentially a joke set to music. He just wasn't forthcoming about its primary target. Was it really the hippies or the rednecks? Subsequent events indicate that Merle sympathized with the rednecks, more out of class loyalty than respect.
By 2003, however, he had switched sides, publicly backing the Dixie Chicks in the media furor over Natalie Maine's comments blasting fellow Texan George W. Bush for his ill-advised decision to invade Iraq. In any event, most country music fans back in 1969 missed the double-edged humor of "Okie from Muskogee." They felt empowered by the surface sentiments, embracing the song as a celebration of small-town values, a conservative slam on the counterculture. They responded with wild enthusiasm whenever Haggard & the Strangers played it during those days of rage when Sixties fervor was yielding to Seventies malaise.
Hag was handsome, described in one magazine article as a cross between Audie Murphy & Warren Beatty. In the '60's & '70s he made frequent guest appearances singing on mainstream television shows. Like his friend & mentor Johnny Cash, Haggard also acted in a few TV shows & films. Yet his music gradually fell out of fashion. It was dropped from most country-radio playlists by the late '80s. Merle is a proud loner who hated currying favor in Nashville. Preferring to live in rural California, he continued to tour extensively as the decades passed. Hag's catalog has long inspired other songwriters. He has become an icon to (mostly middle-class) fans of the music variously labeled alt-country, roots & Americana. The official national stamp of approval came in 2010, when Pres. Barack Obama bestowed the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors award on Merle Haggard.
On a lighter note, the massive popularity of "Okie from Muskogee" spawned a throng of less accomplished rhyming imitators. Among them was Rusty Adams, whose ripoff "Hippie from Mississippi" posits parents so ashamed of their rebel son that they change the family name. Hag's hit also led some musical liberals to answer him via song. The best title of that bunch has to be "Asshole from El Paso" by Chinga Chavin, an obscure 1976 parody. I'm guessing that it got little airplay during the USA's bicentennial.
Finally, breaking news of the death of Pete Seeger, folk-music master & giant among progressive activists, helps me see "Okie from Muskogee" in a new light. It more or less fits in the tradition of witty American protest songs, beginning with the Swedish immigrant & radical-union bard Joe Hill. Executed in Utah in 1913, Hill's irreverent "The Preacher & the Slave" promises "we'll all get pie in the sky when we die." In the 1940s the prolific folksinger & songwriter Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native who inscribed This Machine Kills Fascists onto his guitar during the war, answered Irving Berlin's smarmy "God Bless America" with his generous "This Land Is Your Land." In one verse - usually deleted in most published versions - Guthrie sings about trespassing in defiance of a Private Property sign because "on the other side, it didn't say nothin' / That side was made for you and me."
Woody begat Pete Seeger, followed by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie & countless others during the postwar folk music revival. The circle came full with the career of Arlo Guthrie (Woody's genetic son), whose draft-dodger masterpiece "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (1967) was a long comical protest song, surpassed only by Country Joe & the Fish's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" for popularity among hippies & Vietnam vets alike.
The sharpest songs by the Sixties generation were frequently tongue in cheek. At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, for example, an ebullient Ochs performed his deadly playful "Talking Vietnam Blues." And the contrarian Dylan declined an invitation to appear on Ed Sullivan's top-rated TV variety show in '63 because CBS wouldn't let him play "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," a crazy sendup of anti-Commie witch-hunters. Back in JFK's heyday the media blacklist (i.e. corporate censorship) kept people like Pete Seeger & fellow civil rights activist Nina Simone, a jazz singer, songwriter & pianist ("Mississippi Goddam," 1964), off network TV altogether.
Smart artists know that nothing undermines tyranny, injustice, hypocrisy & pomposity as effectively as critical humor set to a catchy melody (Exhibit A: Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag," 1965). Songwriters who are both politically committed & musically talented are hardly extinct. Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg & Steve Earle epitomize those who still dare to take on important social issues in song.
I just wish they were more widely heard. The World Wide Web, a medium cluttered with content & demographically fragmented, seems unlikely to launch a benign cultural revolution. The chances of human survival would surely be enhanced by the popularization of songs saying something that truly matters. All the better if those songs make us laugh to keep from crying along our troubled journey into the future.
"Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing." Rest in peace, Pete Seeger, who hoped that the pen is mightier than the Bomb & proved it.
