An Apology for Merle Haggard

Anyone who remembers the live version of "Okie from Muskogee" a few years ago is familiar with the way some people respond to Merle Haggard. When, in 1969, he was singing:

We don't burn our draft cards down on

Main Street,

'Cause we like livin' right and bein' free, *

the background audience sounded like an army of cowboys in throes of orgiastic delight.

There were bound to be other reactions. Radio stations in the northeast began playing the song. Indeed, it was one of the few true country and western records ever to get non-country air play (Waylon Jennings's "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" and "Harper Valley P.T.A." were more "pop" than country.) "Okie" caught on with the "other" audience. The reasons, as one might expect, were perverse.

Young people in this part of the country would hear the reactionary message--the tirade against long hair, "free love" and LSD--and somehow would find it pleasant. Two kinds of insecurity about the sixties' new cultural and quasi-political values were assuaged. The paranoids could become enraged, raising a battle cry to fight the "rednecks" to the death, and anyone else with an uneasy self-image of rebelliousness could indulge his smugness by laughing at the yokels. It was better than John Wayne (no guilt about liking "Stagecoach") and besides, it had a great tune.

The possibilities for satire were obviously limitless. After the song came out (and became one of the largest-selling country records in history), Haggard was bombarded by requests for rights to the music: rock singers wanted to change the lyrics and strike back. A sure success formula, but Haggard refused to sell, and someone had to write a new tune for "Hippie from Olema" ("we don't throw our beer cans out the window," love, peace, etc.). Arlo Guthrie used to kick off his concerts with "Okie" itself, verbatim.

It was all a great joke, and although Merle Haggard continued to write and sing country songs, he lost the brief attention of the wider audience.

What he did next, actually, was to record something called "Fightin' Side of Me":

If you don't love it, leave it,

Let this song that I'm singin' be a warning,

When you're runnin' down our country.

hoss,

You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me. **

Now, this is enough to alienate about anyone. (Except Richard Nixon, apparently, who is said to enjoy both songs, along with Johnny Cash's "Welfare Cadillac": this spring Haggard played at Mrs. Nixon's birthday celebration, on stage in front of an enormous, draped American flag). Even if Merle Haggard's significance as a cultural figure had anything to do with this right-wing gibberish, spewing quotations from these songs isn't likely to win many converts.

In view of this, a defense of Merle Haggard runs two risks. First of all, one doesn't want to be labelled a victim of some twisted pop decadence, a sort of latent Alice Cooper fanatic who took a wrong turn. Even worse, the whole thing threatens to suggest the let's-sit-down- and-rub-shoulders-with-the-truckdrivers (they're so real) syndrome.

But there's another, healthier angle on Merle Haggard, one that places him in the populist tradition of American folk music. A phenomenon like this needs years to take shape, and those two songs aren't much for posterity to leap on. But when one looks at Haggard's life, and some music more representative of him than "Okie" and company, one sees the seeds of a raw, anachronistic ethos, the kind of stuff that twenty years can turn into a romantic mythology.

Haggard's biography is one way in which there is more Woody Guthrie than Bull Connor in him: it's the perfect Grapes of Wrath tale of a family migrating from Oklahoma to the San Fernando Valley during the Depression, carrying what they could, nearly starving, making it through by hard work and a strict refusal to accept charity from anyone.

Leaving home at 14, Haggard stole cars and drank, basically--bumming around the country for five years. He finally ended up doing a couple of years in San Quentin. (Drunk, he had tried to burglarize a cafe which wasn't even closed. He says prison frightened him into "reforming".)

This is where Haggard seems to have gotten his orientation and his songs again and again echo themes of loneliness (rather than alienation), alcohol (rather than drugs), and poverty (for which hard work and a sense of dignity rather than social awareness is the remedy). Singing about hobos and prisons, Haggard feels like a protest singer, a spokesman for the working man who has his pride or the railroad bum who has his dreams.

Sung in clean, resonant tones full of calm emotion, his music captivates, sounds as firmly rooted in earthy, American myth as Woody Guthrie, as evocative of restlessness and despair as early Dylan. And then he has to go and ruin it all with a reference to those "chiselers" who are "living off the fat of our great land."

It's a dilemma: the atmosphere and the most basic sentiments are so right for a genuine American folk music, and yet the ideas went wrong somewhere.

An occasional offensive lyric, however, doesn't detract from the fact that the music itself is pure untarnished country, with a sensuality that bluegrass music often lacks.

Southern black blues fathered country and western music, which stayed in the hills unchanged for generations while the strains that travelled to the city became jazz. After the glorious period of Jimmie Rodgers, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb--country music started to become big business. Nashville discovered the way to make its music a mass commodity in the mid-sixties--by adding background violins and Hollywood choruses to the dobros and the pedal steels.

As country music spread to the northeast and the west coast, it showed an even greater propensity for being co-opted than rock music had. By now, the vast majority of country and western music has gone Glen Campbell--commercial pop with a reference to ol' Ma and Pa thrown in. Merle Haggard is virtually alone in holding on to the original forms.

Haggard himself almost seems self-conscious about his unpretentious image. While his producers play on the political Haggard (not allowing him to record a song he wrote about an inter-racial love affair, pushing a "he's been through it all" product), he himself determinedly shuns the life-style of many Nashville stars, who say "I'm just a country boy" and spend their vacations in Las Vegas. His friends are the friends he had before he went to prison; he goes fishing and drives beat-up cars. He cultivates "success won't change me."

Meanwhile, he's trying to create a few legends for the forefathers of country music. His album of Jimmie Rodgers songs ("California Blues", "Carolina Sunshine Girl", "Frankie and Johnny", "Peachpickin' Time in Georgia") is the finest album in the field for years. He learned to play the fiddle so he could revive the "Western Swing" of an old group called Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He recently released something with a strong "honky-tonk" influence. All these albums are tarnished only by Haggard's habit of throwing in embarassing bits of wistful prose as "tributes" to whomever he is honoring.

This is needless, because the music--tasteful, impeccable country music--is tribute enough, not only to Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, but to Merle Haggard. On one live album, Haggard introduces one of his own songs, saying abashedly, "Maybe someday they'll say, 'this is an old Merle Haggard number'". And when he launches into the sad, sad white blues, it's a voice from another time.

*from "Okie from Muskogee" (words and music by Merle Haggard and Roy Edward Burris) copyright 1969 by Blue Book Music; used by permission.

**from "Fightin' Side of Me" (words and music by Merle Haggard) copyright 1970 by Blue Book Music; used by permission.