The story of how the Haggards acquired the car offers a glimpse of the era's widespread prejudice toward
Okies, though the singer's own pride in his origins would later inspire his 1969 hit, "
Okie from Muskogee.
Follow along with this do-it-yourself
Okie bowhunter as I take you on a multi-state exploration of America's beautiful heartland.
So, as the
Okies had Woody Guthrie singing their song, perhaps today's underemployed and unemployed metalworkers should adopt the words of Paul Simon and "Get on the bus, Gus; make a new plan, Stan .
In the 1985 Orange Bowl - I was covering it for a Seattle-area paper - the
Okies made a field goal during a comeback attempt.
This is really the biggest hick town in the country because it was nothing but
Okies that moved out here.
The
Okies ended up landless, homeless, and impoverished, forced to watch their children starve in a land of plenty.
But he was denounced - over and over - for his overt and effective and powerful espousal of the poor and the dispossessed and the downtrodden, witness the Joads and their fellow
Okies in flight from poverty, constantly on the road, a Model T Ford - kept together by luck, skill and string - their only possession of value.
Not All
Okies Are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona by Geta LeSeur
That's a major reason why moving to California - immortalized in popular tunes as absurdly different as "California, Here I Come" and Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" - is to participate in a great mythic American adventure, one expansive and resilient enough to encompass the experience of gold miners in the 1840s, movie pioneers in the 1910s,
Okies in the Depression, hippies in the '60s, and continual waves of immigrants from all over the world.
6 percent discount, and even the
Okies forked over 19.
Californies, desert, Dust Bowl, Gokies, Good Deal, Great Depression, Great Drought, Great Impression, Hokies, Mexico, New Deal, No Deal, oceans,
Okies, Oklahoma, Franklin D.
Van Morrison was a gruff old bastard even when he was 17, so he's finally grown into his curmudgeonly looks; Bob Dylan, never really one for the platform heels or satin singlet, is now closer to the old
Okies and folkies who gave him the music in the first place; Mick Jones from the Clash has swapped his punk rock looks of yore, for the image of a crumbling accountant; and even the two biggest pantomime clothes horses of them all, Bowie and Elton John, have become a model of restraint.
