Welcome to MUSKOGEE
The Power of a Song
Okies. It was a word spoken with derision in the fertile farmlands of California and directed at the farm workers and their families who had come here back in the Dust Bowl days looking for a better life. Growing up in Bakersfield, California a young singer and songwriter named Merle Haggard had heard this word flung at him and it wasn’t considered a compliment. It carried the sting of shame.
Then Haggard and his band – The Strangers – started touring the country and gaining some recognition for their “Bakersfield Sound.” They were scheduled to play a few gigs in Oklahoma and for the first time, Merle visited the state that his parents had left years earlier.
Here he found the rich, red earth, acres of golden wheat, endless blue sky, and quirky stops along the “Mother Road,” -- Route 66. And he found Okies – the real Okies – down-to-earth people who were friendly, honest, respectful and unapologetically patriotic. People who were proud to be Okies.
Haggard found himself feeling proud to be called an Okie, too, and the snatches of a song began to play in his mind. “Well, I’m proud to be an Okie . . .”
With Eddie Burris, the band’s drummer, Haggard worked on the lyrics of this new song. One stop on the concert schedule was a town called Muskogee and here the song really took shape. Haggard and Burris finished the song and they titled it, “Okie from Muskogee.”
The song was a slightly tongue-in-cheek reaction to the hippie movement, anti-war protests, free love and drug culture that had characterized the turbulent decade of the 1960s. Espousing small town American values, the two songwriters knew Okies would like it and so would many others across America.
They wanted to record their song while it was fresh and before they had to be on the road. The acoustics weren’t right in the Civic Center arena so they searched for a smaller room. Stretching the cords of their equipment as far as they could, they set up in a backstage restroom. Here the first recording of “Okie from Muskogee” was made and a hit was born!
Haggard and his band returned to Muskogee later the following year and recorded the song live at the Civic Center for the album it was released on. It was an instant hit and flew to the top of the charts. The song was embraced, not just in America, but around the world. It even went to the moon.
When the Apollo 16 mission to the moon was launched in April of 1972, Charles Duke, Jr. was the lunar module pilot on that flight. Wanting to take something with him that was quintessentially American, he took two identical cassette tapes of songs. “Okie from Muskogee” was on those cassettes.
According to Eddie Burris, Duke played the cassettes while in space and then set one at the base of the American flag that he and crewmate John Young had planted on the moon’s surface. The other cassette returned to earth and Duke donated it to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.
Today, as far as we can know, that cassette tape still sits on the moon’s gray dust, testimony to the power of a song that can touch a cord in the hearts of people around the world.
-Jonita Mullins
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