Actually no, I’m not from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where “We don’t smoke marijuana” and “where even squares can have a ball,” as country singer Merle Haggard celebrated. Still I’m almost proud to be from there as I ponder the history of the version Merle first sang, what he came to make of it, and what became of it over the years since he first wrote the lyrics (with Roy Edward Burris) during the Vietnam War.

It’s complicated. Just before the pandemic hit and he mostly stopped live touring, for the first time I heard Kris Kristofferson, surely closer to the hippie Merle mocks in the song than to a square, in live concert. (There is a 1975 version on YouTube of Kris singing “Okie” with Cher and Rita Coolidge that seems to suggest some ironic awareness; the younger Kris throws around his mop of wild hair as he intones the lyrics about not letting “hair grow long and shaggy.”) That pre-pandemic night Kris, himself oddly enough a former soldier, sang  of the hippie-like values and addictions Merle chastised accompanied by “The Strangers,” the very band Merle founded and toured with until his 2016 death.

Memories of that night came flooding back when CBS released a special featuring Willie Nelson’s 2023 ninetieth-birthday concert. Woven through it are several appearances by a frail Kristofferson, supported tenderly by such singers as Roseanne Cash and Nora Jones. These made me grateful I’d experienced Kris live when I did and reminded me again of the “Okie” complexities.

Because they also live in me, riven by paradoxes in my roots and life trajectories, the contradictions inherent in hearing Kris sing Merle’s famous “Okie from Muscogee” did fill me with a certain rapture. The contradictions throb in me, for example,  as I remain committed to pacifism yet will never forget how moved I was by the stories of U.S. veterans I met while dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

By the end of his life it seemed clear Merle, once a prisoner pardoned for burglaries by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, was singing the song within layers of complexity I could never claim fully to plumb yet which intrigued. The Okie (which he only kind of became after his family migrated from California during the Great Depression) who sounded like he was bashing anyone who smoked marijuana had battled addictions himself.

Anyone who hasn’t heard Merle sing “Amazing Grace” at St. Quentin, where he had been imprisoned, hasn’t fully experienced grace. This version is ragged, rough, and raw–throbbing with awareness of how “wretches” (an “Amazing Grace” lyric I rejected when younger, before I grew old enough to recognize myself in it) are saved.

So this is who sings about being from Muscogee. And in his singing so many layers of meaning, he reminds what richness imperfect people can offer if true to their truths rather than addicted to offering fake truths.

I and we needn’t agree with Merle on every detail to grasp that here is a real human being, someone who has traveled through vicissitudes with integrity, acknowledging and even magnifying them when called for. Here is no flattening of meaning but ever deeper exploration of it.

And so as Merle ages his songs become ever richer, their subtexts ever more resistant to simple interpretations, such that it made sense at Kris’s concert for his audience to break into applause as  “Okie from Muscogee” launched.

We were sitting, that night, in a country in which some loved “only squares can have a ball” and others loved the possibility that Merle’s song is at least partly the satire Kris may think it to be. Yet the song transcends the divisions.

The hatreds and animosities that spawned it in the 1960s as war raged have perhaps not so much healed as mutated and maybe even intensified. Interpretations and responses to “Okie” have mutated as well. Some see it as one more inspiration for continuing the cultural battles. But as I ponder Kris singing Merle’s song as his own life fades and with the band Merle’s death left behind, I find myself living at least briefly in a world in which only squares can have a ball yet with the hippies sing toward that grace still able to amaze.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo