Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee. In this post I want to introduce my book about Merle Haggard’s most controversial album, Okie from Muskogee: Live from Muskogee, Oklahoma, an album noteworthy above all for the way its title cut energized numerous important national conversations. Almost exactly two years ago Haggard, a Bakersfield country music legend, died on April 6, which was also his birthday. It struck me that I might use this coincidence of celebration and grief, of beginning and ending, to discuss here three things Haggard initiated over the course of his career, and three things he ended. Indeed, one of the things that drew me to writing about the album that introduced the song “Okie from Muskogee” is what striking example it is of the work music does—as I have, in frustration, made my students stand up and chant on more than one occasion, “There is no such thing as “‘just entertainment’!” Haggard started a new tradition in commercial country music: the singer playing the role of autobiographical hero. There were hints of this before Haggard’s moment in the career of Jimmie Rodgers, who recorded, for instance, songs about dying of tuberculosis. But after rural Southerners moved in droves to cities and out of the South, representatives of their group identity were needed—and called into being—by country music’s fan base. When Haggard became a prominent figure in country music is after he began to narrate his life in his songs, fairly early in his career. He recorded songs about his family’s experience in labor camps, about his time (multiple times, actually) in jail and prison, about the loud club scene in Bakersfield, California, where he was born and where a hard, loud, rude counterpart to the polite Nashville country scene originated. This is when his career took off. Haggard also introduced into commercial country an explicitly anti-racist songbook. He wrote two songs, for instance, about lovers in interracial relationships, persecuted by racists. “Irma Jackson” is about the white singer’s relationship with a black woman that is tragically ended by the woman’s fear. (Haggard wanted this to be the follow-up to “Okie from Muskogee,” but his record label refused and it came out later.) Similarly, “Go Home” is about racists forcing the singer’s lover to move back to Mexico. Particularly resonant in our moment is Haggard’s 1978 song “The Immigrant,” which mocks wealthy white landowners for exploiting the labor of undocumented Mexican workers and then deporting them—until they are needed again. The song also notes that they are working on land that has been stolen from Native Americans. In a related move, Haggard was notable for bringing jazz into his country songs, thereby refuting the structuring racist logics of the recording industry. This led to his being the first country musician to appear on the cover of the jazz magazine DownBeat , with an accompanying article that referred to him as a “country jazz messiah.” Many of Haggard’s songs have honking horns; one of my favorites is “Am I Standing in Your Way.” Haggard linked his prison time to learning about a range of instruments and musical traditions—and also his experience picking crops as a young man, when different groups of workers sang different kinds of music. He spoke of his love of jazz throughout his life. In an important indication that anti-fandom can be as shaping as fandom, “Okie from Muskogee” introduced a new generation of parody in the multiple response songs it envoked. For the most part, these songs took the original quite straight, despite numerous indications that it is a parody (my favorite sometimes being that Haggard—who made it through a total of 9 days of high school—cracks up a tiny bit when he sings the line, “The kids all still respect the college dean”). With impressive efficiency, Bob Dylan has noted that nobody would take the song at face value if Randy Newman had recorded it—but the various parodic versions are instructive in what they assert. And what they assert is mostly insulting to Southerners for being simpleminded, although, of course, Haggard is from California, and his music is quite modern-sounding and sophisticated: the instrumental introduction to “Okie” alone is an excellent example of the latter. Of course, Haggard did not only kick off some important new creative modes; he also helped bury some pernicious traditions. For many people, he ended the scornful defining of “Okie” from outside—a discriminatory process presented famously, and condemned, in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. This created a fan group who took the song as a proud assertion in addition to the haters who took the song as an obnoxious assertion. Fascinatingly, and tellingly, the fan group who took the song at face value and were grateful to Haggard as a result tended to be working-class, while the haters tended to be middle-class and frequently used class markers to mock the song. Perhaps the rudest example of this is the most efficient: Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys assert that “rednecks from the South” fuck sheep and drink cheap beer, among other things, in his parody of the song, “Asshole from El Paso.” One of the most valuable contributions Haggard made, and an important extension of his many, many songs about class and work, was that in a range of ways and locations, he ended the fantasy separating the musician from the laborer, and the creation of music from work. Instead, he worked hard (sorry, couldn’t resist) to connect the two. So in addition to portraying workers and jobs repeatedly over the course of his career— including, as I mentioned above, the exploitation of undocumented workers, but also a sympathetic song about a sex worker, songs about truckers, songs about migrant workers in labor camps, songs about factory workers, and many more—Haggard found numerous ways to introduce songs as work, and not just songs about work. He wore a hard hat and carried a metal lunch bucket on a record cover, for instance. He gave albums titles that included a version of the word “work.” He produced an album on which he chats with band members to introduce the songs, overlaying picking cotton and picking guitars (among numerous other assertions of music as work). He introduced a guitar solo by declaring, “Here comes that workin’ man!” Over the course of his career—it became easier, of course, once he was well established—Haggard ended various mythologies about him. (At the very least, he tried to end them—we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t acknowledge that they have staying power.) Late in his life, released a music video with famous country-stoner Willie Nelson, in which they both smoke pot, and recorded a version of “Set My Chickens Free,” a song about LSD (though he rather slyly changes the lyrics as a possible cover story, replacing “LSD” with “Vitamin C”—another piece of drug slang, but one he could assert he took at face value). He wrote a song about how we need a woman to be president. He recorded a Woody Guthrie song for a Michael Moore movie about capitalism. He publicly opposed the Iraq War. Finally, just as Haggard was born and died on the same date, he began—and ended—in “Okie from Muskogee” the use of the phrase “leather boots are still in style for manly footwear.” I think we should be grateful for both. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee is out now! Purchase your copy here . 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If you have any questions related to the pricing and/or discount offered in a particular listing, please contact the seller for that listing. Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin. Merle Haggard and Okie From Muskogee. A Most Merry and Illustrated Historic Evaluation. It's rare that a song intended to censure a specific socio-cultural group was sung with gusto by the group itself. But it wasn't unknown for members of the 1970's counterculture to belt out: We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee. We don't take our trips on LSD. These, of course, are the iconic opening lines to Merle Haggard's hit tune "Okie From Muskogee". And if there's any doubt as to who Merle's song was censuring, he spelled it out pretty clearly: We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy Like out in San Francisco do. But what really caught the public's ear was the catchy sing-along chorus: 6. square: INFORMAL old fashioned or boringly conventional - Oxford Dictionary of English (Third Edition, 2010) First released in September, 1969, "Okie From Muskogee" quickly rose to #1 on the country and western charts. Three months later on December 29, Merle sang "Okie" in a live performance at - of course - Muskogee, Oklahoma. In his introduction to the song which ended the concert, he said: The fact that Oklahoma for some reason or another has been able to keep out of the [counterculture] conflict and the college campuses haven't had any trouble that I know of - haven't been in the news anyway. And [applause] . and as far as I know is about hippie free. The concert was recorded and released as Merle's first live album. Both the single and the album sold over a million copies and were Merle's first Gold Records. The popularity of "Okie" also had the welcome effect that Merle's fee for live appearances skyrocketed. But how did a pure country and western song, complete with de rigueur sob-in-the-throat ornamentations, also make it to the pop charts? We'd really like to know this. I thought you would, as Captain Mephisto said to Sidney Brand. It's very simple really. To a large extent the song backfired. Yes, you can see the song as affirming traditional values. But it was also a perfect example of unintentional self-satire on the very people for whom the song was intended to celebrate. Soon there appeared the inevitable parodies. One version sung by John Denver and Taffy Nivert was particularly pointed: I'm proud to be an Okie From Muskogee I'm proud to be a redneck from the South. There's flag decals on all of my car windows. Love me or I'll punch you in the mouth. Of course, anyone can argue that these words are every bit as opinionated as the original. Other satires, though, were milder and less confrontational, such as the Youngbloods' "Hippie From Olema". Naturally for the last chorus the words were changed to: We still take in strangers if they're HAGGARD. What to make of the song? Well, at the least and looking back from a span of half a century, some of Merle's lyrics are puzzling. For instance the last two lines of the chorus are: We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse. White lightning's still the biggest thrill of all. Although the Official CooperToons Advice is to eschew all proscribed substances, there is the legitimate question as why anyone would single out a product for criticism whose major component has been reported by peer-reviewed scientific reports to reduce nausea arising from medications prescribed for serious illnesses - and at the same time singing the praises of a product which is also prohibited by law and whose main component has been linked to cancer, stroke, fibrosis, arrhythmias, steatosis, cardiomyopathy, hypertension, hepatitis, pancreatitis, cirrhosis, is responsible for 3,000,000 deaths per year, and also makes you pee. And the motive? Just why did Merle write the song? Shortly after he released "Okie", Merle explained his motive. This is the most contemporary exposition of his views: I don't like [the hippies'] views on life, their filth, their visible self-disrespect . They don't give a ! what they look like or what they smell like. Now with all due respect to Mr. Haggard and his opinions, we must doubt that at this time he had much interaction with the "hippie" counterculture. So we must question his authority regarding any particular miasma originating therein. As for someone representing values, in his early years Merle was not - as he readily admitted - the most sterling example. After a largely fatherless childhood of petty crime with stints in juvenile reformatories, Merle finally obtained his majority and in 1958 he landed in San Quentin for burglary. The actual sentence is reported variously on the Fount of All Knowledge as ranging from two-and-a-half years to fifteen. The variability thus reported, though, does have a simple explanation. First, a prison sentence is not a specific number of years, but is inevitably a range . Next, the range of years can be pretty broad. Truth to tell, Merle's sentence was six months to 15 years. Usually, a prisoner is eligible for parole after serving one-third of the maximum - which would have kept Merle in the hoosegow for half a decade. On the other hand technically you can get out after serving the minimum. Johnny Cash He inspired Merle. Although you do hear that it was one of Johnny Cash's famous performances at the prison that inspired Merle to change his ways, a stint in solitary with nothing to read but a Bible and nothing to wear but pajama pants also made an impression. So Merle switched from being a rather rebellious inmate and an escape risk to a model prisoner. After two years and nine months as a guest of the State of California, Merle was paroled. Merle had been a member of the prison band, and he was determined to make a career in music. Fortunately he had enough talent to realize his ambition. And a particular stroke of luck was that his hometown was Bakersfield. Bakersfield is about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles and in the 1930's had attracted a lot of Dust Bowl refugees. Merle's mom and dad, Jim and Flossie, had lived in Checotah, Oklahoma, about twenty miles south-southwest of - yes - Muskogee. They settled in Bakersfield in 1935, and Merle was born two years later. Musical ability ran in the family, and when Jim lived in Oklahoma, he had played both fiddle and guitar. It was as a kid that Merle began playing guitar. Out of the slammer, Merle returned to Bakersfield and began to play in the bars and honky-tonks. This was the right place at the right time. Bakersfield had become the center of a country music revolution. Getting away from the smooth sophisticated sound that had been inspired by the swing bands in the 1930's and 40's, the musicians around Bakersfield began working with lean and stripped down instrumentation. Called "outlaw" country, the music worked quite nicely, thank you, with just a couple of guitars, a bass, and maybe drums. Merle's ability as a singer and musician (he learned to play a good country fiddle as well) brought him to the attention of another Bakersfield musician, Buck Owens. Buck was already an established country star, and Merle landed a spot as one of Buck's Buckaroos . Of course, Merle had bigger plans, and he soon struck out on his own. In 1962, only two years after his parole, Merle recorded a single "Sing a Sad Song" which made #19 on the Country Charts. In 1965, Merle formed a band called the Strangers which was staffed with top-notch musicians, and Merle quickly landed a contract with Capitol Records. Their first album, simply titled Strangers , did well, but it was their second album, Swinging Doors in 1966 that reached #1. The same year Merle's single "The Fugitive" hit #1 and the next year "Branded Man" also reached the top. The usual story is that Merle and the Strangers were driving through Oklahoma and saw a sign pointing to Muskogee. Merle mentioned to drummer Roy Burris that he bet they didn't smoke marijuana there. So with "Okie" and "Muskogee" having an obvious internal rhyme, they soon had the song. Merle debuted "Okie from Muskogee" at a concert at Fort Bragg, Louisiana. As soon as they finished, some of the soldiers came on stage and told him they wouldn't let him leave until they sang the song again. Merle and the Strangers had to sing "Okie" a total of four times to end the show. Things weren't so chummy at the White House when in 1973 President Richard Nixon had specifically invited Merle to perform. The reaction of the audience - virtually none of whom were country and western fans - was muted. The band also didn't quite fit in with the black-tie bunch as Merle's $1000 Stetson had become a bit bedraggled. At the airport the wind had blown it into the mud, and he didn't bother getting it cleaned. Still you'd think that there would have been a warmer reception. In 1971 Dick had declared his famous "War on Drugs" which was not, according to one of Dick's principal advisors, prompted by a desire to instill in the country proper values. Instead the War on Drugs was intended to be a tool to target and incarcerate Dick's adversaries in the counterculture and black communities. But Dick loved "Okie from Muskogee". Once when Johnny Cash performed at the White House, Dick, completely unaware of John's philosophy of tolerance and his friendship with many folk singers of the left, asked him to sing the song. Johnny instead played "What is Truth?" which is the exact opposite of what Dick wanted to hear. A young man sittin' on the witness stand, The man with the book says "Raise your hand." And although the young man solemnly swore, Nobody seemed to hear anymore. And it didn't really matter if the truth was there. It was the cut of his clothes and the length of his hair. In defense of Merle, it would certainly be wrong to pigeonhole him as a one-dimensional and narrow minded dogmatist. After the success of "Okie", Merle wanted his next release to be "Irma Jackson", a song about the troubles encountered by an interracial couple. The inspiration for this song might have been from the problems his friend Johnny Cash had after racist groups began claiming that Johnny's first wife, Vivian, was black. In the song Merle seems to be saying, so what? What does it matter? But reportedly the producers scotched the idea. They wanted a follow-up to "Okie From Muskogee". Merle agreed and wrote "The Fightin' Side of Me". They're walkin' on the fightin' side of me, Runnin' down a way of life Our fightin' men have fought and died to keep. If you don't love it, leave it. Although Merle did release Irma Jackson in 1972, this did not mean he immediately adopted an ivory-and-ebony theme for his songs. Five years later Merle wrote "I'm a White Boy". And there are, we must admit, parts of the lyrics that raise concern: Cause daddy's name wasn't Willy Woodrow And I wasn't born and raised in no ghetto. The song is not, Merle's critics say, something to promote ethnic tolerance and harmony. But Merle's fans snort, oh, c'mon. Clearly the song's not intended to be taken seriously. After all, there's the verse: Well, I'm out to find me a wealthy woman And a line of work that don't take no diploma. So Merle's song is nothing more than self-deprecating satire of the "good old boy". He certainly isn't putting down other races. So don't get bent out of shape and just lighten up, for crying out loud. Naturally Merle's critics disagree. Instead of making excuses, look these four sequential lines from the song: I ain't black and I ain't yella, Just a white boy lookin' for a place to do my thing. Yeah, I don't want no handout livin'. Don't want any part of anything they're givin'. Certainly a listener might wonder. Is Merle implying that other races do want a "handout livin'"? And this is from the guy who was saying he wanted to find a "wealthy woman"? Still, we can cut Merle some slack. About ten years later, he seems to have undergone a change of heart: "Okie" made me appear to be a person who was a lot more narrow-minded possibly than I really am. But that didn't mean the song didn't reflect Merle's basic philosophy. As he later said. I didn't give a ! how long their hair was. But the fact that the ones with long hair were the ones burning the ! flag - I didn't like it. I still don't. See, I've got to go with this flag until they hang up one that's better. And then in yet another ten years he was saying: Sometimes I wish I hadn't written "Okie". Not that I'm ashamed of it. I'm not sure but what bothers me most is the people that identify with it. There is the extremity out there. . and he later supplemented: At the time I wrote that song, I was just about as intelligent as the American public was. And they was about as dumb as a rock. I had been brainwashed like most of America . But if a guy doesn't learn anything in 50 years, there's something wrong with him. Without doubt the biggest surprise was in 2005 when Merle and folk singer Bob Dylan made a brief tour together. The truth is that Merle had always been a fan of Bob's music stretching back to the early 1960's. And yes, on the tour Merle did sing "Okie from Muskogee". Bob Dylan He toured with Merle. There was no way around it. Wherever Merle appeared, that's what people wanted to hear. But as his opinions and philosophy evolved, so did the song. When Merle performed with Kris Kristofferson in 2011 and knowing the audience of the 21st century wasn't the same as that of forty years before, he changed the lyrics a bit. What had been sung as . We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy Like the hippies down in San Francisco do. We STILL let our hair grow long and shaggy Like the PEOPLE over in San Francisco do. Then Kris took over: We don't smoke our draft cards in Muskogee. We ain't never heard of pitchin' woo. We don't shoot that deadly marijuana. We get drunk like God wants us to do." Kris was joking, of course. Merle's 1969 live performance wasn't his only appearance in Muskogee. When he returned two years later, fully ten percent of the city's population turned out for the concert. Alas, at that time Muskogee had been going through some tough times. The police force - the representatives of justice - had nine members that had been forced out. That was a substantial chunk of the total, and to help preserve order the city officials had asked the governor, Dewey Bartlett - yes the same Honorable Dewey Bartlett who bestowed on Merle his OKIE status - to send in the National Guard. Governor Bartlett demurred but did agree to assign additional state highway patrolmen to the city. To fill in any slack, the local Odd Fellows Lodge volunteered to supply personel to help maintain order, an offer that the city officials accepted. Order was needed indeed. A business owned by a city councilman had burned down and arson was suspected. Like the Marquess of Queensbury, we make no charge but five minutes after the fire was discovered, a police car had been seen leaving the scene. The internal dissension within the force grew, and a number of wives of the policemen demanded the police chief be replaced. At that time the chief of police was certainly not a long term job. A previous chief had resigned after his car had been bombed. It's hard to believe that all of this went on in a town immortalized as the Épitomé of Wholesome Values by that most Quintessential of Patriotic Songs . And in the greatest irony, on the day Merle performed the concert, four teenagers were arrested with - yes, a grocery bag containing marijuana. But worse was to come. A state trooper had his hat stolen. Will these OUTRAGES never CEASE . My House of Memories , Merle Haggard with Tom Carter, Cliff Street Books, 2003. "Haggard, Merle Ronald (1937-2016), Oklahoma Encyclopedia of History , The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture . "Merle Haggard", Biography , April 2, 2014. "Merle Haggard by the Numbers: His Gold and Platinum Albums", Ryan Faughnder, The Los Angeles Times , April 6, 2016. Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee , Rachel Lee Rubinart, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. "Merle's 'Okie From Muskogee' Era Home for Sale", Robert Price, Barkersfield.com , August 6, 2018. "Bob Dylan Raves About Springsteen, Downplays Haggard Feud", Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone , February 13, 2015. "Campaigns Aside, 'Okie' Remains Offensive Term", Kevin Canfield, Tulsa World , July 15, 2007. "Why 'Okie From Muskogee' Was Merle Haggard's Contradictory Masterpiece", Charles Aaron, Rolling Stone , April 7, 2016. "Merle Haggard: 'Sometimes I wish I hadn't written Okie From Muskogee'", Martin Chilton, The Telegraph , April 8, 2016. "How Merle Haggard Went From Solitary Confinement to Stardom", Lily Rothman, Time , April 6, 2016. "Merle Haggard Could Easily Have Died in San Quentin", Trevor Burrus, Newsweek , April 12, 2016. "Country Music Stalwart Merle Haggard Dies Aged 79", The Irish Times , April 6, 2016. "Merle Haggard's Too-Good-To-Be-True Story about Johnny Cash? It Really Happened", Emily Yahr, The Washington Post , April 8, 2016. "Buck and Merle", Peter King, The Los Angeles Times , June 18, 1995. "Alcohol", World Health Organization . Merle Haggard's Life of Crime , This Week , October 1, 2009. "Report: Aide says Nixon's War on Drugs Targeted Blacks, Hippies", Tom LoBianco, CNN , March 24, 2016. "When Merle Haggard Played at the Nixon White House", Tevi Troy, The Observer , April 7, 2016. "Okie from Muskogee: Recorded 'Live' in Muskogee, OK by Merle Haggard: A Critique of Willful Misinterpretation", Adam Newton, Bearded Gentlemen Music , July 19, 2018. "Muskogee Okla., Model City in Country Music Song, Is Torn by a Police Rift", Martin Waldronjan, The New York Times , January 10, 1971. "Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson 'Okie From Muskogee' at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass ", Mark Konings, YouTube , October 5, 2011. "Merle Haggard: The Outlaw", Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone , May 5, 2016. The Political Message Behind Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” He released it in September 1969 as the first single off his album of the same name. By November, “Okie From Muskogee” had hit number one on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. After the song became extremely popular, Haggard recorded a live album and that version of “Okie From Muskogee” became a hit among fans as well. In the song, Haggard sings of the traditional values of Muskogee, Oklahoma, and how he’s proud to be from a place where people were patriotic, didn’t smoke marijuana, take LSD, wear beads and sandals, burn draft cards, oR challenge authority. The Origin Of The Song. “Okie From Muskogee” began as a joking exchange between Haggard and his drummer Roy Edward Burris. The Telegraph reports that while touring the country, Haggard spotted a sign that read, “Muskogee, 19 miles,” and he joked to Burris that they probably didn’t smoke marijuana in the small town. The rest of the band joined in and threw out other activities that probably wouldn’t be happening in Muskogee, and because of the times they were in, talked about the Vietnam War. The next night, Haggard and his band The Strangers played the song to see how it would be received. “ Soldiers started comin’ after me on the stage and I didn’t know what was going to happen next until they took the mic and said we’d have to do it again before they’d let us go ,” he told The Telegraph . Haggard revealed he had never had that strong of a reaction to one of his songs before. It was then that he became what The Weekly Standard like to call him, the “musical spokesman for the Silent Majority.” He Did It For The Troops. To protest the Vietnam War, American men would burn their draft cards – something that Haggard sang about in “Okie From Muskogee,” and for good reason. “When I was in prison, I knew what it was like to have freedom taken away. Freedom is everything,” he told The Boot . During the Vietnam War, he was witnessing a lot of different kinds of protests while young men were being drafted into a war. “Here were these [servicemen] going over there and dying for a cause — we don’t even know what it was really all about — and here are these young kids, that were free, b—hing about it,” he said. “There’s something wrong with that. We were in a wonderful time in America, and music was in a wonderful place. America was at its peak, and what the hell did these kids have to complain about?” He continued, “These soldiers were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free. I wrote the song to support those soldiers.” A Song About Pride And Patriotism. In 1988, Haggard told the Birmingham Post-Herald , “[The song] was just kind of a patriotic song that went to the top of the charts at a time when patriotism wasn’t really that popular.” “Okie From Muskogee” became a political anthem for Middle America, who felt their voices had been silenced with all the protests going on. Over the years, Haggard had seen people interpret his lyrics and get in debates about them, but no matter your political opinion, he wanted to make sure that everyone knew what the song was really about – pride. He told Village Voice‘s Nat Hentoff, “ My father came from the area, worked hard on his farm, was proud of it and got called white trash once he took to the road as an Okie. Listen to that line: ‘I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.’ Nobody had ever said that before in a song .” He explained that “ the main message in Muskogee was pride, and the patriotism was evident. “ Watch Haggard perform “Okie From Muskogee” at what would be his final public performance before he passed away. Jeffrey Melnick and Rachel Lee Rubin. Harvard Book Store welcomes UMass Boston professors JEFFREY MELNICK and RACHEL LEE RUBIN for a discussion of 1969 culture and counterculture—featuring their new books, Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family and Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee (33 1/3) . About Creepy Crawling. "Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds. Even now, it is almost impossible to discuss the sixties, teenage runaways, sexuality, drugs, music, California, and even the concept of family without referencing Manson and his "girls." Not just another history of Charles Manson, Creepy Crawling explores how the Family wasn't so much one of outsiders but emblematic of the Los Angeles counterculture freak scene, and how Manson worked to connect himself to the mainstream of the time. Ever since they spent two nights killing seven residents of Los Angeles—what we now know as the "Tate-LaBianca murders”—the Manson family has rarely slipped from the American radar for long. From Emma Cline's The Girls to the recent TV show Aquarius , the family continues to find an audience. What is it about Charles Manson and his family that captivates us still? Author Jeffrey Melnick sets out to answer this question in this fascinating and compulsively readable cultural history of the Family and their influence from 1969 to the November 2017 death in prison of Charles Manson, himself, and beyond. About Okie from Muskogee. Every now and then, a song inspires a cultural conversation that ends up looking like a brawl. Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee , released in 1969, is a prime example of that important role of popular music. Okie immediately helped to frame an ongoing discussion about region and class, pride and politics, culture and counterculture. But the conversation around the song, useful as it was, drowned out the song itself, not to mention the other songs on the live album-named for Okie and performed in Muskogee-that Haggard has carefully chosen to frame what has turned out to be his most famous song. What are the internal clues for gleaning the intended meaning of Okie ? What is the pay-off of the anti-fandom that Okie sparked (and continues to spark) in some quarters? How has the song come to be a shorthand for expressing all manner of anti-working class attitudes? What was Haggard's artistic path to that stage in Oklahoma, and how did he come to shape the industry so profoundly at the moment when urban country singers were playing a major role on the American social and political landscape? Jeffrey Melnick. Jeffrey Melnick has been thinking about the Manson Family since first encountering the book and mini-series Helter Skelter in the 1970s. Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rachel Lee Rubin. Rachel Lee Rubin is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA, and Director of the Center for the Study of Humanities, Culture, and Society. She has published and taught extensively on popular music, popular culture, and culture of the American left. Rubin is a regular media commentator on popular culture and public affairs. Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes. As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St. Unable to attend a Harvard Book Store author event? You can still pre-order a signed book by one of our visiting authors. While we can't guarantee fulfillment of a signed book pre-order, our authors are almost always able to sign extra books to fulfill such orders. 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