On This Day in 1969, Merle Haggard Released a Song That Arguably Was a Better Tribute to Oklahomans Than “Okie From Muskogee”

If songs like “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” painted Merle Haggard as a troubled, steel-nerved poet for the Everyman, then songs like “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me” were songs that added an important distinction: Haggard was a poet for the Everyman who acted right, loved his country, kept his hair short, wore boots, and played football.

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“Okie from Muskogee” became a signature song for Haggard, which is something he would later come to regret. Speaking to GQ in 2012, over four decades after he first released the über-patriotic track, Haggard said it “probably set [his career] back” about forty years.” He felt like he alienated the less conservative corners of his audience, and he was probably right. Lines like “‘cause we like living right and being free” became antitheses for the counterculture movement, which Haggard didn’t necessarily mean to create in such a cut-and-dry way.

If a different song, which Haggard released on February 17, 1969, had become his signature, then some of this ideological nuance might have been clearer. Moreover, we’d argue that “Hungry Eyes” was a better tribute to the state and people of Oklahoma than “Okie”.

Merle Haggard Paid Tribute to His Family With “Hungry Eyes”

Although Merle Haggard technically never lived in Oklahoma—his mother, Flossie Mae, had him in Oildale, California—he always felt a deep connection to the hardships felt in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Haggard’s family’s farm in Checotah, Oklahoma, burned to the ground in 1934, forcing them to make the long, arduous move from the Plains to the West Coast. The Haggards were just a small part of the hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans moving to California in the hopes of a better future.

Haggard’s 1969 track, “Hungry Eyes”, paints a portrait of a family like his own. They never worked in the “crowded labor camps” Haggard mentions in the first verse, but he certainly resonated with the father in the second. “He dreamed of something better, and my mama’s faith was strong, and us kids were just too young to realize / That another class of people put us somewhere just below / One more reason for my Mama’s hungry eyes.”

While Haggard never mentions Oklahoma as explicitly as in “Okie from Muskogee”, these sentiments highlighted the resilience of the Plains people as a whole. It’s a celebration of their perseverance, not some of the population’s prejudice against “long-hairs.”

Ironically, the hardships laid out in “Hungry Eyes” are inevitably what led to the frugal conservatism of “Okie from Muskogee”, yet they read as two entirely different perspectives in hindsight. Nevertheless, both songs were hits, although the latter was certainly deemed more anthemic than the former. “Hungry Eyes” appeared on A Portrait of Merle Haggard and topped the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.

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