When Merle Haggard and the Strangers started cutting up over a running joke about an Oklahoma road sign in the mid-1960s, the musicians would have no way of knowing what kind of polarizing anthem they were about to create. Even Haggard himself has flip-flopped on his feelings about “Okie From Muskogee”, a seemingly natural consequence of the public misinterpreting, appropriating, and imbuing Haggard’s song with identity politics he didn’t necessarily ask for or agree with.
Yet, artists and bands continued to cover Haggard’s hit song, even when they would more closely identify with the long-haired hippies Haggard’s song denounces—not the least of which was The Grateful Dead. And maybe that’s because they could see what the average Okie could not: the tongue-in-cheek humor of it all.
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The Grateful Dead Once Covered “Okie From Muskogee”
Merle Haggard’s 1969 hit single, “Okie From Muskogee”, draws an (apparently) clear line in the sand between the narrator’s beliefs and the lifestyle of those with whom he disagrees. “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 living right and being free.” Given that these are the lines that open the whole song, one wouldn’t necessarily anticipate weed-smoking, LSD-tripping musicians like The Grateful Dead to cover a track like that.
But they did. During a joint concert with The Beach Boys on April 27, 1971, The Grateful Dead busted out their rendition of Haggard’s conservative anthem. A band like that covering a song like that offered a different perspective that Haggard originally intended but never got across to his right-leaning audience: humor.
Even Kris Kristofferson, an outspokenly liberal artist, covered the song the following year. During his 1972 Live At The Philharmonic concert, Kristofferson introduced his rendition of the song, “with apologies to our good friend Merle Haggard, who is neither a redneck or a racist. He just happens to be known for probably the only bad song he ever wrote” (via Country Reunion Music).
Merle Haggard’s Hit Song Started As a Joke
Per country music legend, Merle Haggard and the Strangers came up with the basis for “Okie From Muskogee” after passing a road sign for Muskogee while touring through the Sooner State. The musicians joked that the people in Muskogee probably didn’t smoke marijuana, which eventually led the players to riff with one another about all the other things they didn’t do in the Oklahoma town. Haggard tied up the loose ends and crafted it into a radio-ready song. But he didn’t anticipate the public’s reaction to it.
What started out as a tongue-in-cheek observation about how quickly people fall into an “us vs. them” mentality turned into the very ideology Haggard was mocking. Conservatives rallied around “Okie From Muskogee” in a way that worried Haggard—so much so that he would later admit to regretting the song altogether. He stood behind it other times, citing how his father inspired him due to people’s treatment of Okies as they traversed West, something Haggard’s family did just before he was born in California.
In a 1981 interview with Quarter Notes magazine, “‘Okie’ made me appear to be a person who was a lot more narrow-minded, possibly, than I really am. 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,” per Country Reunion Music.
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