Word: haggards
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...possibilities for satire were obviously limitless. After the song came out (and became one of the largest-selling country records in history), Haggard was bombarded by requests for rights to the music: rock singers wanted to change the lyrics and strike back. A sure success formula, but Haggard refused to sell, and someone had to write a new tune for "Hippie from Olema" ("we don't throw our beer cans out the window," love, peace, etc.). Arlo Guthrie used to kick off his concerts with "Okie" itself, verbatim...
...great joke, and although Merle Haggard continued to write and sing country songs, he lost the brief attention of the wider audience...
...this is enough to alienate about anyone. (Except Richard Nixon, apparently, who is said to enjoy both songs, along with Johnny Cash's "Welfare Cadillac": this spring Haggard played at Mrs. Nixon's birthday celebration, on stage in front of an enormous, draped American flag). Even if Merle Haggard's significance as a cultural figure had anything to do with this right-wing gibberish, spewing quotations from these songs isn't likely to win many converts...
...view of this, a defense of Merle Haggard runs two risks. First of all, one doesn't want to be labelled a victim of some twisted pop decadence, a sort of latent Alice Cooper fanatic who took a wrong turn. Even worse, the whole thing threatens to suggest the let's-sit-down- and-rub-shoulders-with-the-truckdrivers (they're so real) syndrome...
...there's another, healthier angle on Merle Haggard, one that places him in the populist tradition of American folk music. A phenomenon like this needs years to take shape, and those two songs aren't much for posterity to leap on. But when one looks at Haggard's life, and some music more representative of him than "Okie" and company, one sees the seeds of a raw, anachronistic ethos, the kind of stuff that twenty years can turn into a romantic mythology...