He broke through on Hot Country Songs back in 2005 with “ Hicktown,” which played as a bro-country anthem a half-decade before the bro-country era. But even without pop crossover, you can picture a 1969 pop chart where Merle Haggard’s spiteful small-town anthem cracked the Top 40, maybe even the Top 10.Īldean has been an A-list country hitmaker for nearly two decades. Also, the Hot 100 back then factored in only pop radio-country stations only reported to the country chart-and there was nothing like streaming to measure exactly how much Americans of all stripes were consuming any given record. 1 album that week, and crowding the top of the singles chart were classics by the Jackson 5, Led Zeppelin, the Supremes, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Sure, the competition was stiff-the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the No. For its cultural resonance alone, “Okie” probably should’ve been a top-charting pop record. But for a little while in late ’69, “Okie From Muskogee” was the record commanding the zeitgeist-even normie-radical Tommy Smothers was talking shit about Merle Haggard on TV. Other than a 1973 Christmas record, Haggard never came close to crossing over on the pop charts again. Is Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” a song, or a Fox News polemic set to music? A piss-and-vinegar ode to small-town life, “Okie” was a chin-out celebration of what rural folk didn’t do: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/ We don’t take our trips on LSD.” Most especially, the song was a takedown of progressive protest culture: “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street” and “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy/ Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.” As Haggard scholar David Cantwell aptly describes it in his book The Running Kind, the song was “a single, ideologically loaded shotgun blast … one early return of fire in what became termed the Culture War.”
The song was Haggard’s eighth country chart-topper but his first single ever to touch the pop chart, despite-or really, probably because of-its anti-urban ethos and vituperative spirit.
In the closing weeks of 1969, Merle Haggard took “ Okie From Muskogee” to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart for four weeks-and, somewhat more surprisingly, No. 41 on the Hot 100, the closest he’d come to cracking the pop Top 40.
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