Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

Author:Rachel Lee Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Country Music and Labor: Hag’s Two Hands

For labor, who will sing?

—Louis Zukofsky

“A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today”

—song by Merle Haggard

Because of the light Haggard shined on a class of people frequently excluded from top-down histories and “high” literature, fairly early in his career he became known as the “working man’s poet,” sometimes rendered as “poet of the common man.” This was because many of Haggard’s songs directly took up the question of work. The most powerful aspect of Haggard’s treatment of labor is the musical balance beam he walked: work was presented not only as an activity, but also as an identity. Workers could be exploited, but still helped each other. Work was not romanticized, but his characters could still be proud of it.

The Okie album pairs Haggard’s most (in)famous song with one of the best known of his many songs about labor, “Workin’ Man Blues.” Through the title of this song, Haggard is immediately placing himself in a robust tradition: there were many songs in many genres with that title already out when he wrote his own—and many to come after his.1 Haggard sings the song in a tone that is part resigned, part proud, and part protest: “I’ve been a workin’ man, dang near all my life/I’ll be working, long as these two hands are fit to use.” It’s hard to know whether he is saying that early retirement isn’t an option for him financially—or that he insists on making this contribution. Significantly, the first three times Haggard articulates the words “workin’ man blues,” it is in the phrase, “Sing a little bit of these workin’ man blues.” But the last two times, “sing” becomes “cry”—a sly indication of the toll working-class labor takes, as well as of one of music’s reasons for being. “Sing,” as it turns out, equals “cry” a lot of the time, if you’re country—and with good reason. Strikingly, on the Okie album “Workin’ Man Blues” is followed by a song about poverty and death: “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” in which the title character dies alone in the cold. This juxtaposition is powerful: the poor are, in the end, ignored.

Haggard’s role as “ethnic hero” meant that much of his attention to class was through the type of character-driven song that “Workin’ Man Blues” represents. To tell the truth, Haggard recorded enough first-person labor songs to constitute their own book. His “Five Days a Week” (a 1996 duet with Johnny Paycheck) turns the Beatles’ celebratory “Eight Days a Week” into country’s specialty—honky tonkin’ through pain—by pointing out that if you are a blue-collar worker you have no choice but to work eight hours a day, five days a week. “Old Man from the Mountain” (1974) introduces a sawmill worker who has labored his whole life and worries that he is being cheated on while he has been working. (The implication is that he is being cheated while he is working—by the sawmill owner.) In “5:01 Blues” (1989) the narrator wants to be glad the work day is over, but no longer has someone to return home to.

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