A career takes flight, ‘Okie’ takes hold
Fresh out of prison with a set of stories to tell, newfound motivation and a cleaned-up act, Haggard started to play honky-tonks, bars and small venues up and down California.
He caught the eyes and ears of record producers Lewis Talley and Charles “Fuzzy” Owen and their small Bakersfield-based label Tally but was eventually signed away by Ken Nelson of Capitol Records. Haggard’s first album, “Strangers,” was released on Sept. 27, 1965, on Capitol and topped out at No. 9 on the Billboard country albums chart.
From there, it was an [insert movie montage] whirlwind of touring matched with a prolific songwriting and recording run averaging two studio releases a year for the remainder of the decade. Haggard’s first No. 1 came with “Swinging Doors, and the Bottle Let Me Down,” released in October 1966. He made 10 studio albums in all for Capitol by the decade’s end.
But it was the release of “Okie,” his first live album, at the beginning of 1969, that would define the rest of his career and rewire everything, including his own point of view — several times.
“I don’t feel now the way I did when I wrote ‘Okie from Muskogee,’” Haggard told columnist RJ Smith in 2000. “I still sing it because it describes a period of time. I write from common knowledge, current knowledge, collective intelligence. 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.”
His most steady collaborator and closest confidant, Willie Nelson, had this to say about Haggard and the song: “I loved singing ‘Okie from Muskogee’ with him. He wrote that song straight from the heart. But as he lived, his thinking progressed,” Nelson wrote in Rolling Stone in the wake of Haggard’s death. “The last time we did it, it was tongue-in-cheek, and the audience knew it. That’s the way he was — he always evolved.”