Merle Haggard died this morning
by
Jansen Estrup
Merle Haggard died this morning on his seventy ninth birthday.
Central Valley news channels gave proper coverage, many minutes of it. His migrant Okie birth, a troubled youth, the 'Bakersfield Sound' he and Buck Owens created and the 38 number one hits he achieved on Country Music charts. Reporters interviewed his friends and bandmates, the curators of a local museum where his childhood home, a boxcar, was being renovated and a section of highway which had been renamed after him were shown. It was thorough and touching, a local hero tribute.
Not much of a country music fan, I mostly recall only Okie From Muskogee, a pop hit in the Sixties. I'd hear it incessantly, or so it seemed, on AFRTS radio in Southeast Asia and it was the anthem of a segment of our ship's company.
Okie from Muskogee
By Merle Haggard
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
We like livin' right, and bein' free
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
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
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.
Songwriters: MERLE HAGGARD, ROY BURRIS, ROY EDWARD BURRIS
A guy called Dutch usually led his friends in song, a quasi-friendly jeering, and we'd counter with Enagada-da-vida, Baby, emphasizing the 'baby' as if it were a broadside. Many a slow midwatch was filled with such banter. Dutch, a West Virginian, was just like the rest of us, though. After a few beers we'd all want to hear anybody at all sing about the hearts we'd left in San Francisco.
Dutch left the Navy in '69, threw his hat over the side when we made port in San Diego. Later, I rejected the Yellow Brick Road and ended up in the mountains, a place my wife calls Paradise. Three decades later I reconnected with Dutch and exchanged a few letters with him. He said he became one of those hippies smoking dope around Balboa Park. Maybe my wife and kids had seen him there. And many years after that, by now a marijuana legalization activist, he went to see Merle Haggard at an intimate venue. Many of the crowd were obviously Vietnam vets, now long-haired and grey. They clamored to hear Okie but Merle ignored them, at first.
"I don't sing that, anymore," he told Dutch and the others. "It is too insulting to people I've come to admire." And to the stunned silence he added. "I've educated myself."
enjoyed the read, after growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, and esp in the Bakersfield area much of my adult life; country and western music, and all music is simply a part of the life of many of us
liked buck owens' Bakersfield sound, never cared much for 'the hag'
Never stop writing
m
For some reason I always thought of Merle as being a drunk. Perhaps it was because of the way he looked. I do know that he started to hang around with Willie at Willy's Texas retreat and probably after smoking a toke or two revised his redneck ways to a more intelligent, mellow mood. (I never smoked marijuana, so I'm just guessing… ;-)).
Cool story about your boat buddies.
Ron