[The Soup Nazi]

 

From a 2010 Uncut interview with Merle (part of an "Outlaw Country" special):

The radio in Lulu's [the diner in which the interview took place] moves onto "The Ballad Of The Green Berets", the swaggering martial anthem made a Number One hit in 1966 by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. It's only sort of a country song, but it's still the sort of country song which causes many people to mistake the genre for a crock of flag-wavin', God-fearin' sentimental schlock freighted with a menacing undertow of xenophobic suggestion that you're not from round here, are yuh? It's an almost amusing irony that the one country song that has been most often used to uphold that simplistic prejudice was written by one of the form's most subtle and astute composers. Merle Haggard and The Strangers are still touring, these days mostly playing in casinos and theme theatres. Are they still playing "Okie From Muskogee"?

"Yeah," he says.

"Okie From Muskogee" was first a hit in 1969, in an America convulsed by the conflict between an insurgent anti-Vietnam war counter-culture and a conservative establishment. A warm, funny snapshot view of the world from the small hometown of Haggard's father ("We don't grow our hair all long and shaggy/Like the hippies up in San Francisco do") it has been both embraced and dismissed as a statement of defiant redneck patriotism. Roy Rogers and George Jones, among many others, sang it straight – and Bruce Springsteen was surely alluding to it in "Long Walk Home", when he invoked the flag flying augustly over the courthouse. Richard Nixon requested it when Johnny Cash played at his White House (Cash, clearly aware of the song's manifold subtexts, refused, diplomatically if incredibly claiming not to know it). Oliver Stone deployed it in Platoon as the favourite singalong of the dim, drunk, good ol' boy faction of his cinematic grunts. Splitting the difference, Bob Dylan has observed, correctly, that if "Okie…" had fallen from the pen of Randy Newman, it would be acclaimed as masterly satire.

Later, Haggard gives Limbaugh some shit. Read the whole article.