On March 8, 1965, U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Da Nang, sparking the first official engagement of American involvement in the Vietnam War. As the military presence escalated, hundreds of thousands of Americans protested. As television brought home images of war, a counterculture began to emerge. Just as the Beat Generation, or Beatniks, had rejected the prevailing social norms, this new breed, the hippy, saw themselves as “freaks” and were open to drugs and free love. Time magazine reported in July 1967 the hippie movement was “blooming in every major U.S. city from Boston to Seattle, from Detroit to New Orleans.”
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“Three Days of Peace, Music, and Love” was the motto of the August 1969 festival near Woodstock, New York, which is the most famous celebration of the hippie counterculture. Country singer Merle Haggard was watching the protests and trying to imagine what his father would have thought about them if he were still alive. He wrote “Okie from Muskogee” from that perspective. After the massive success of that record, he wrote a follow-up. Let’s take a look at the meaning behind “The Fightin’ Side of Me” by Merle Haggard.
I hear people talkin’ bad
About the way we have to live here in this country
Harpin’ on the wars we fight
An’ gripin’ ’bout the way things oughta be
An’ I don’t mind ’em switchin’ sides
An’ standin’ up for things they believe in
When they’re runnin’ down my country, man
They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Gray Area
Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson wasn’t crazy about a song like “Okie from Muskogee”—until it sold a million copies. Then he asked Haggard for another song just like it. The songwriter was not a right-winged fanatic, as the song implied, but he was looking at it from both sides. Like all politics, there was a lot of gray area.
Haggard told Marc Eliot in 2022’s The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard: “I sure was down on the hippies during the uprising that started in 1968 and 1969, which is what ‘Fightin’ Side’ was directed toward.”
Yeah, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Runnin’ down the way of life
Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep
If you don’t love it, leave it
Let this song I’m singin’ be a warnin’
If you’re runnin’ down my country, man
You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
No Solutions
“That’s how I got into it with the hippies. … I thought they were unqualified to judge America, and I thought they were lookin’ down their noses at something that I cherished very much, and it pissed me off,” Haggard said on the PBS American Masters documentary “Learning to Live with Myself. “And I thought, ‘You sons of bitches, you’ve never been restricted away from this great, wonderful country, and yet here you are in the streets bitchin’ about things, protesting about a war that they didn’t know any more about than I did.’ They weren’t over there fightin’ that war any more than I was.”
The way Haggard looked at it, hippies did nothing but complain about everything they believed was wrong with the country. President Richard Nixon, the war, the draft, etc. They offered no answers on how to fix anything or improve the situation by offering real solutions to the real problems.
I read about some squirrely guy
Who claims, he just don’t believe in fightin’
An’ I wonder just how long
The rest of us can count on bein’ free
They love our milk an’ honey
But they preach about some other way of livin’
When they’re runnin’ down my country, hoss
They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
No. 1
Haggard was back in the studio two months later to record the follow-up to “Okie from Muskogee.” The single was released as soon as possible, and it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. The album was at No. 1 for seven weeks and remained on the chart for a year and two months, making it one of Haggard’s most successful releases.
Yeah, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Runnin’ down the way of life
Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep
If you don’t love it, leave it
Let this song I’m singin’ be a warnin’
If you’re runnin’ down my country, man
You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
They Have the Right
Marches started springing up outside concert venues as protests were organized to oppose not only the war in Vietnam but also Haggard’s music. People took the song as a full-on endorsement of military involvement. President Nixon sent Haggard an appreciative letter and invited him to perform at the White House multiple times. Haggard spoke openly about the protests and insisted they didn’t bother him. As Americans, it was the people’s right to express their opinions.
Yeah, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Runnin’ down the way of life
Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep
If you don’t love it, leave it
Let this song I’m singin’ be a warnin’
If you’re runnin’ down my country, man
You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
The End of the Hippie Movement
As U.S. participation in Vietnam ended in 1973, the media largely lost interest in the hippie movement. Many hippies assimilated themselves into the once-despised mainstream culture. One example was a young man who embraced Buddhism. After a visit to India in the early ’70s, Steve Jobs “conceived of the idea of personal computer as putting computer power in the hands of ordinary people, and taking it away from IBM.” He went anti-establishment as he started Apple computers.
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Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
