In 1969, two little towns came to represent two opposing cultures in America. After the counterculture held its summer festival in Woodstock, N.Y., a counter-counterculture movement was launched in the fall through the agency of a song called “Okie from Muskogee,” in which the singer-songwriter Merle Haggard extolled the traditional values held dear in Muskogee, Okla. And he did it in the same in-your-face style as the war protesters. “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” the song began. “And we don’t take our trips on LSD/And we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street/But we like living right and being free.”
“Okie from Muskogee” transformed Haggard from a performer of semi- autobiographical country songs about prison into a musical spokesman for the Silent Majority. The “Okie” album went gold, a rarity in country music in those days, Haggard’s concert fee tripled to $ 10,000 a night, and he began bringing in $ 1 million a year in gross income. When he sang “Okie” at concerts, audiences would get almost as excited as the crowd at Woodstock. ” They are on their feet, berserk, waving flags and stomping and whistling and cheering, joining in on the chorus,” Paul Hemphill wrote in a 1971 article in the Atlantic about the reaction to the number at a concert in Dayton. ” For those brief bombastic moments, the majority isn’t silent anymore.”
