Allen, Mike

English

University of Washington: UW Tacoma Digital Commons

University of Washington TacomaUW Tacoma Digital CommonsSIAS Faculty Publications School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences5-2009Review of "Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics,Country Music, and Migration to SouthernCalifornia" by P. La ChapelleMike AllenUniversity of Washington Tacoma, magician@uw.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/ias_pubPart of the American Popular Culture Commons, Music Commons, and the Social HistoryCommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW Tacoma Digital Commons. Ithas been accepted for inclusion in SIAS Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UW Tacoma Digital Commons.Recommended CitationAllen, Mike, "Review of "Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California" by P. LaChapelle" (2009). SIAS Faculty Publications. 41.https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/ias_pub/41Reviews of Books 313Proud to be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. By Peter La Chapelle. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007. 222 pp. $60 cloth, $24.95 paper)Singer/songwriters Steve Goodman and David Allen Coe once collaborated to pen what they described as the “perfect” country song. “You Never Even Call Me by My Name” was peppered by Coe’s impersonations of famous country singers (e.g., Merle Hag-gard and Charlie Pride) and concluded with a rambling verse featuring lost love, strong drink, rain, prison, trains, trucks, and Momma. “Well I was drunk the day my Momma got out of prison/and I went to pick her up in the rain,” Coe sang, with his tongue firmly planted in cheek. “But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck/My Momma, she got run over by a damned old train.” While Peter La Chapelle would applaud Coe’s Haggard imi-tation, he would definitely add three more items to the list of in-gredients for the perfect country song: politics, class struggle, and race. “I have written this book not just as a history of Okie identity within country music,” writes La Chapelle in the introduction, “but also as a study of urban identity politics, residential segregation, and ultimately, race” (p. xii).Using Woody Guthrie and Merle Haggard (who wrote and sang the Vietnam-era hit “I’m Proud to be an Okie from Musko-gee”) as bookends and pivots, La Chapelle explores Southern California’s country music scene to try and understand the three-decade shift of American workingmen’s allegiances from Franklin Roosevelt’s collectivism to Ronald Reagan’s market capitalism. In so doing, he opens up an important and under-explored topic, based on arduous research in secondary literature, memoirs, in-terviews, and recording industry archives. He traces this history from Guthrie’s leftist ballads, to Spade Cooley’s western swing, to Haggard’s “Bakersfield Sound,” to the country rock stylings of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. One of the most important PHR7802_04.indd   313 3/18/09   2:12:20 PMPacific Historical Review314contributions of this book is demographic. While tracing Okie mi-gration and settlement of the American West, La Chapelle shows marked shifts in the domiciles of country music fans by mapping the locations of working-class neighborhoods and honky-tonk bars and dance halls.Through the lens of cultural studies, La Chapelle bolsters a conclusion reached by more traditional historians: “The producer-based and citizenship-oriented New Deal liberalism that had cap-tured the attention of millions of working-class voters in the 1930s and 1940s ultimately gave way to a more conservative and less egal-itarian property-based political culture in the post-World War II era” (p. 3). La Chapelle finds this conclusion disheartening. Like many cultural studies proponents, he treats schools of thought as alli-ances, art as politics, and he yearns for a new day when “Califor-nia’s refugee-outcast tradition might [still] be a powerful tool for highlighting and even combating poverty and political marginal-ization” (p. 222). Although La Chapelle is uneasy about the right-wing politics represented by Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” he understands Haggard’s ideological contradictions and states on p. 217 that Haggard has probably never even voted. This is an important book, and reviewers will no doubt ap-proach it in a variety of ways. This reviewer was left wanting less talk of power and race and a more diverse ethnomusicological nar-rative. This well-researched and well-written book needs a more evocative description of the strains of country fiddles and pedal steel guitars, more mournful tales of lost love, strong drink, and Momma.University of Washington, Tacoma MICHAEL ALLENPHR7802_04.indd   314 3/18/09   2:12:20 PM

Review of  Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California  by P. La Chapelle

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Review of Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California by P. La Chapelle

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