Generally speaking, an artist has little to no control over which of their songs will become the most popular and commercially successful, and that’s certainly true of the iconic Merle Haggard song he would later say he wished he hadn’t written. And indeed, the song is one of the most interesting examples of a paradoxical hit in country music history. In some markets, the song boosted his career exponentially. In others, the song bruised it.
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Regardless of who might have been listening, Haggard often said he regretted the persona that his career-defining song created.
An Antithesis To Anti-War Hippie Movements Of The Late ‘60s
Country music legend Merle Haggard’s greatest career high came with the release of his 1969 half-parodistic, half-patriotic hit, “Okie from Muskogee.” The song achieved tremendous commercial success, shooting to the top of the Billboard Hot Country Singles and No. 41 on the Hot 100 chart. Even before Haggard officially released the song with his band, The Strangers, the group knew they had something special based on audience reaction alone.
Recalling the time he debuted the song on stage at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina, officers club, Haggard said, “Soldiers started comin’ after me on the stage. I didn’t know what was going to happen next until they took the mike and said we’d have to do it again before they’d let us go. I had never had this strong of a reaction before.”
That reaction proved to be the same across the country. Haggard’s ode to conservative living was a direct antithesis to the anti-war, peace and love movements happening on the West Coast in the late 1960s. And that’s no interpretation. It’s literally what he says. 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. For the millions of Americans who didn’t identify with the hippie-led counterculture, Haggard’s song was a welcome breath of fresh air. A chance to be seen and uplifted.
But that was never Haggard’s goal.
Merle Haggard Said He Wished He Hadn’t Written This Song
“Okie from Muskogee” catapulted Merle Haggard into the persona of a proud conservative who supported the troops and rejected liberal hippie values. During a late 1980s radio appearance, Haggard said he never had as big of a problem with “hippies” as the song might have suggested. “I didn’t give a s*** how long their hair was,” he said. “But the fact that the ones with long hair were the ones burning the damn flag—I didn’t like it. I still don’t. See, I’ve got to go with this flag until they hang up one that’s better.”
Haggard agreed that it was a patriotic song, but the difference was that he was writing it parodistically. The song wasn’t celebrating one side and denouncing the other. It was highlighting the fallacies of either extreme. The fact that the general masses didn’t pick up on this nuance disappointed the country legend. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t written Okie,” Haggard lamented during a 1990 interview. “What bothers me most is the people that identify with it. There is the extremity out there. It made people forget that I might be a much more musical artist than they give me credit for. I was indelibly stamped with this political image, musical spokesman, whatever.”
Even decades later, in a 2012 interview with GQ, Haggard commented that the song, which was among the ones that would become synonymous with his entire musical legacy, “set [my career] back about forty years.” He also admitted there are “about seventeen hundred ways to take that song.” So, one could argue that “Okie from Muskogee” set his career forward by forty years by solidifying his place as one of the most enduring country artists of the mid-20th century.
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