They don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

Interesting that Merle Haggard has admitted 

that he wrote this song (Okie from Muskogee) as a satire.

His son seems to take the politics more seriously.
One of Merle's latest songs says that we should stop fighting wars
and spend more time and money on fixing this country.
listen to America First.

"Merle Haggard was in his early twenties, serving a possible 20 years in prison when San Quentin guards found him, drunk off his own beer, after he'd fallen into a latrine. "They handcuffed my ass and took me to where they gas people," he said. It's one of many heartbreaking stories in Merle Haggard: Learning to Live With Myself, a new PBS documentary about the country legend. The film features interviews with Keith Richards, Kris Kristofferson, John Fogerty, and Robert Duvall, and examines the hardships of Haggard's Bakersfield, California upbringing. He lost his father at age nine, spent his teenage years escaping from youth institutions and later penned 38 Number One country classics."
from "Rolling Stone" magazine.








"Already a major country star, Haggard became a household name, and, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin more than a century earlier, “Okie” clove that house in two. So politically charged were the times that even chitchat around the dinner table, ordinarily useful to keep family values on track, could erupt into screaming matches. Nightly. America was, then as now, in the midst of a bitter cultural war, and everything got serious when names like Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King and Abbie Hoffman came up in conversation. Haggard’s song inserted him into the middle of that discussion.
By the winter of 1969 there was no middle ground, and where you stood on “Okie” firmly established which side you were on, whether you wore sandals or boots, whether you thought hippies deserved to be beaten or honored for their opposition to the Vietnam War. Haggard’s next single, the patriotically charged “Fightin’ Side Of Me”, made clear where he stood.
No, it didn’t, actually.
The reaction to his latest single, “That’s The News”, smartly selected from his latest record, Like Never Before (on his own Hag Records imprint), suggests just how complex and mercurial a figure Merle Haggard has always been. And what a gifted artist he remains."
from American Masters.





All of the above is a lead-in to this.
Sunday night, October 3, in Branson we went to see Marty Haggard (Merle's oldest son).

He does a tribute show singing his father's songs and telling stories about his life and his dad's.
It was a fun show (Merle had a lot of hits),
and he did a good job on my favorite
Merle song "If We Make it Through December" which relates to the struggles of the working class.

But Marty obviously believes in America Red White and Blue; Love it or Leave It; God's on our side.

When he sings "The fightin' side of me" (which says that you better not say anything bad about the USA) you know that he believes it.
And the crowd in Branson really loves these "patriotic" statements.

I don't want this blog to become a political one, but politics permeates everything in our lives, and I find it amazing that people don't think more about the underlying messages in the comments that are made. For example, Marty comments that Merle went "from the jail-house to the White House in 10 years" (he was honored by then president Nixon -- a pardoned criminal by the way) then says that today the process should be reversed for some of the people in the White House.





Anyway, I don't expect that you'll see the Dixie Chicks playing Branson anytime soon.