The song Merle Haggard would always regret: “I’m different now”
If you’ve written a hit song, the likelihood of it following you around for the rest of your life is almost inevitable, which became a certain curse for Merle Haggard.
‘Okie From Muskogee’ is one song that’s brought him a great deal of attention and celebration over the years, especially in his home state of Oklahoma. However, it’s also drawn its fair share of criticism from people who consider the lyrics to be backward, uneducated and ignorant, and while it was originally written with the intention of celebrating the simple attitudes to life that were held by Oklahomans, Haggard would later denounce the song in a similar fashion.
Written in 1969, the track was initially a response to the ongoing protests happening across college campuses over America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. While swathes of the population actively campaigned against the senseless barbarism, Haggard initially saw it as a movement spearheaded by unwashed hippies who had no respect for those who were serving in the conflict and risking their lives, and the lyrics don’t hold back in suggesting this.
The first verse alone pulls no punches whatsoever: “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”. All of this is a stab at how the liberal and progressively-minded student demographics in states like California were actively rallying against America’s violence on foreign soil, but the moral high ground it attempts to take over their attitudes to drug use and conscientious objection ends up being a series of low blows.
At the time, he claimed there was something inherently wrong with the youth of America for their stance on the war, and expressed his discomfort with this point of view in an interview with The Boot. “Here were these [servicemen] going over there and dying for a cause,” he argued, “We don’t even know what it was really all about, and here are these young kids that were free bitching about it. There’s something wrong with that.”
However, in a 2010 interview with American Songwriter, it appeared as though his position had changed significantly over time, and he was willing to admit that he’d lost a lot of love for the song due to its dated points of view. “It was the photograph that I took of the way things looked through the eyes of a fool,” he confessed, “I was just as dumb as a rock about that time, and most of America was under the same assumptions I was.”
His retrospective take on this lyrical misstep shows a great sense of maturity and willingness to change with time and societal attitudes. Despite its flaws, it is still a well-crafted country song that remained a part of Haggard’s setlist until his death in 2016, but with this newfound clarity, he shifted from pride to intentionally take on a more mocking tone. “I’ve learned the truth since I wrote that song,” he added, “I play it now with a different projection. It’s a different song now. I’m different now. I still believed in America then; I don’t know that I do now.”
