Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson' Okie from Muskogee' Live Concert Version

#MERLEHAGGARD #WILLIENELSON #MERLE #hag

OKIE FROM MUSKOGIE

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street
'Cause we like livin' right, and bein' free
We don't make a party out of lovin'
But 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
And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all
Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear
Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen
And football's still the roughest thing on campus
And the kids here still respect the college dean
And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all
In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA

#MERLEHAGGARD #HAG

Merle Haggard was one of country music’s most versatile artists. Stylistically, he mined honky-tonk, blues, jazz, pop, and folk, and his repertory ranged wide: aching ballads (“Silver Wings”), sly, frisky narratives (“It’s Been a Great Afternoon”), semi-autobiographical reflections (“Mama Tried”), political commentaries (“Rainbow Stew”), proletarian homages (“Workin’ Man Blues”), and drinking songs that are jukebox, cover-band, and closing-time standards (“I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”).

Haggard’s acolytes are legion and include many of country music’s brightest and lesser lights, as well as thousands of nightclub musicians. As fiddler Jimmy Belken, a longtime member of Haggard’s exemplary touring band, the Strangers, once told the New Yorker, “If someone out there workin’ music doesn’t bow deep to Merle, don’t trust him about much anything else.”

Merle Ronald Haggard was born poor, though not desperately so, in Depression-era Bakersfield, California, to Jim and Flossie Haggard, migrants from Oklahoma. Jim, a railroad carpenter, died of a stroke in 1946, forcing Flossie to find work as a bookkeeper.

Flossie was a fundamentalist Christian and a stern, somewhat overprotective mother. Not surprisingly, her youngest child grew quickly from rambunctious to rake-hell. By his twenty-first birthday, Haggard had run away from home regularly, been placed in two separate reform schools (from which he escaped a half-dozen times), worked as a laborer, played guitar and sung informally, begun a family, and performed sporadically at Southern California clubs and, for three weeks, on the Smilin’ Jack Tyree Radio Show in Springfield, Missouri. He’d also spent time in local jails for theft and bad checks.

Haggard’s woebegone criminal career culminated in 1957 when, drunk and confused, he was caught burglarizing a Bakersfield roadhouse. After an attempted escape from the county jail, he was sent to San Quentin, where, in a final burst of antisocial activity, he got drunk on prison home brew, landing himself briefly in solitary confinement.

Haggard was paroled in 1960 and, after a fitful series of odd jobs, got a regular gig playing bass for Wynn Stewart in Las Vegas. Years later, his friend, the iconic songwriter Kris Kristofferson, called Haggard “the most successfully rehabilitated prisoner in American history.”