Dope Smoking Dump Monkiez ****tard hates Merle Haggard.

[dutch508]

jpak (29,282 posts) http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027743573

I'm sorry, but Merle Haggard was a right-wing reactionary unAmerican asshole and I am quite certain his stupid song incited violence against those that did not look, or act, or believed in the stoopid shit he espoused.

yup

Which song, ass-wipe?

yellowcanine (28,676 posts)
67. He also claimed the Okie from Muskogie was satire......And I believe him. I thought it was satire when it came out. (I know that dates me).

It was released in 1969.

skip fox (14,275 posts)
124. I never understood why he'd write this song.

When I heard he said it was satire I felt stupid for not realizing this at once, but then I heard it from so many sources who played it not as satire, but as an anthem against the counter-culture. That's my only excuse.

The man was real.

Merle's dad was from Muskogie.

djg21 (1,174 posts)
196. This is an over-simplification that is not correct.

It really isn't that simple.


in an effort to claim Haggard as one of their own, some of these critics are arguing that Nixon, Reagan, and the song's fans in middle America missed its deeper meaning. "Okie from Muskogee," they say, was intended as a light satire of provincialism, and its audience just didn't get it.

. . . .

Even writers more sympathetic to country music's fans assert that "Okie" wasn't meant to be taken literally. "He wrote a song as a lark, kind of a gentle joke, and he became the biggest star in country music," writes Paul Kingsbury, editor of the Journal of Country Music, in the book The Grand Ole Opry History of Country Music. Similarly, the editors of Country Music magazine describe "Okie" in the 500-page Illustrated History of Country Music as "the infamous hippie-baiting song which he claimed to have written as a joke."


http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-battle-over-quotokie-from-muskogee/article/8361


Then, in 1969, came the song that would become Haggard's biggest pop hit, "Okie from Muskogee," and that would change his career once more. "It probably set it back about forty years," he mutters.

There are, says Haggard, "about seventeen hundred ways to take that song," and over his career he has alternately endorsed and sidestepped most of them. In it, the narrator he was thinking of—I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee—was some version of his father. On the surface, and to some extent beneath it, the song was a celebration of traditional conservative American values at a time of great turbulence—short-haired, drug-free Americans who believe in the flag, don't burn their draft cards, and are proud to be square if square is what they are.

But Haggard says he regretted the song almost immediately. He feels, with reason, that it pushed away a part of his audience and that it brought him attention he never wanted; the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace, presumably sniffing a kindred spirit, made overtures to him, albeit ones that were rejected. If there were two paths his career could have taken from there, the one he had chosen was cemented by his next single. He had suggested a song called "Irma Jackson," a thoughtful tale of an interracial romance, but he was argued out of it. Instead, he released "The Fightin' Side of Me"—a wonderful, defiant roar of a song, but one that helped fix him in the public imagination as the champion of angry, proud conservatives who had had enough:

When they're runnin' down our country, man,
They're walkin' on the fightin' side of me.

These days, Haggard seems to reduce much of the fuss about "Okie from Muskogee" to its position on marijuana, perhaps because it is the part of the song his subsequent life most completely disavowed. We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, the song begins, and at the time, this was true for Haggard: He had smoked it neither there nor anywhere else. He didn't until he was 41, when he was advised to do so by a physician. "I didn't like the way it made me feel at first," he says, "so they coad me and showed me." Soon the cure took hold. "The only thing they didn't tell me," he says, "was how habit-forming it was."


http://www.gq.com/story/merle-haggard-profile-chris-heath

jpak (29,282 posts)
9. I was around when 'Okie From Muskogee' was a hit

were you?

 

Star Member El Supremo (17,674 posts)
12. Long before you.

It was satire, you fool.

jpak (29,282 posts)
15. No it was not

It was an anti-hippie pro-war screed.

yup

 

jpak (29,282 posts)
161. RW gun nuts are easily confused by pretty things that justify their FUed ideology.

Just ask Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity

yup

Star Member spanone (84,752 posts)
7. you have no clue.

judge/dismiss an entire career by one song from forty odd years ago.

nope

yourpaljoey (1,006 posts)
8. Can't stand him His sickening voice or his shallow songs.
No loss at all.

jpak (29,282 posts)
14. He was the reason I rejected country music

et al.,

He cashed in on RW racist pro-war '60's bullshit

yup

jpak (29,282 posts)
52. back in the day it was a powerful anti-hippie statement

and it was a terrorist screed

yup

LannyDeVaney (777 posts)
49. 99.9% of country singers, no matter how talented, are simply playing to their audience ...

which is the deep-red, redneck, under educated South.

(Alert trolls - I am born, raised, and live in Alabama)

I have Outlaw Country playing all the time. I love it. Give me some David Alan Coe.

Odin2005 (51,822 posts)
65. I bet OP is an middle class urbanite who thinks all us rural people are "dumb hicks", too.

jpak (29,282 posts)
159. Money grubbing yes - but politically no

If you were subject to RW "volunteer" "civic duty" hippie hatin' Law & Order Draft Boards

back in the day maybe you would understand the zeitgeist of this song...

jpak (29,282 posts)
186. My play list would not include MG or any other RW douchebaggery

such as...

Toby kkkeith

or

Blo-cephus

or

Gen.R.Lee Greenwood

yup

this idiot has got to be a mole.

Star Member hobbit709 (40,069 posts)
192. Pretty pitiful when you rec your own OP after 191 replies and 0 recs

[thundley4]

LannyDeVaney (777 posts)
49. 99.9% of country singers rap artists, no matter how talented, are simply playing to their audience ...

which is the deep-red, redneck, undereducated South ghetto youth.

FIFY

[Mr Mannn]

Only DU could hate a man who loved his country.

[SVPete]

These are the types that grave-danced when Bob Hope died, for the sin of having entertained US troops in Vietnam. Scroom!

Haggard, like Hope, was something >>90% of DU-folk will never be, a creator and producer.

[diesel driver]

These are the types that grave-danced when Bob Hope died, for the sin of having entertained US troops in Vietnam. Scroom!

Haggard, like Hope, was something >>90% of DU-folk will never be, a creator and producer.

Not to mention, conscious.

[CollectivismMustDie]

If you could filter out their hate, they wouldn't have much to say.

It might sound like bad audio at a drive-through, which would be a distinct improvement.


CMD

[Ralph Wiggum]

If only TomInTib were still around.  He might regale us with his encounters with Merle.

RIP, Merle.

[Karin]

I read that thread a bit ago, just after Merle died.  That annoying, hateful and repulsive "jpak" ends every single one of his posts with "yup."  Makes you want to punch him in the face. 

[CollectivismMustDie]

  Makes you want to punch him in the face.

With extreme prejudice.


CMD

[Tess Anderson]

I read that thread a bit ago, just after Merle died.  That annoying, hateful and repulsive "jpak" ends every single one of his posts with "yup."  Makes you want to punch him in the face.

yeah, this guy is a huge idiot and a troll - he claims to be a woman at one site, then he goes by "MisterMan" at the junior DUmp. In reality, I think he's a fat guy from Maine that posts day and night.

[98ZJUSMC]

Star Member hobbit709 (40,069 posts)
192. Pretty pitiful when you rec your own OP after 191 replies and 0 recs

 

[98ZJUSMC]

If you could filter out their hate, they wouldn't have much to say.

It might sound like bad audio at a drive-through, which would be a distinct improvement.


CMD

 

yup