If Dwight Yoakam is correct in insisting that the cultural ethnicity of country music is the “Grapes of Wrathculture,” then we must begin by considering how that “ethnicity” came into being. In some respects, Okie country music emerged on a sour note in the mid- to late 1930s: a time of privation, worrisome migration, and intense media scapegoating in California. Although much of this book is concerned with the images and sounds that migrant musical performers created, this chapter focuses on the images that others produced to malign the migrants. So relentless were these attacks, in fact, that migrants’...

Conjuring up an image that seemed to revel in every squalid detail, Kenneth Crist’s May 1939 report on Okie trailer camps for theLos Angeles Times Sunday Magazinewas typical “migrant horde” slander. The “trailerites” who resided in these camps on the outskirts of the city, Crist argued, were “loafers,” “career men in relief,” and pinball-playing “relief chiselers.” Their trailer homes were “virtual hovels where sanitation flirts with the legal margin.”Worse yet was “the police problem” posed by the even poorer “jungle camps” of shacks and old tents in county river bottoms. These camps were periodically “cleaned out” by sheriff’s...

Coworkers Gustav H. W. Sudmeier and Vince “Little Fox” Waldron lived in two worlds. By day, they were industrial workers who cut, ground, honed, and crafted some of the most sophisticated aviation components of the 1940s. By night, they drew on their age-old inheritances as western swing musicians. Sudmeier, a tool-and-die maker at Longren Aircraft Company in Torrance, California, had left a life as a truck farmer in Baden Station, Missouri, a burg so thick with Germans that Sudmeier, the son of immigrants, never lost his accent. Waldron, a machinist, was a member of the Blackfoot nation who had been...

For a pop music disc jockey, the Los Angeles radio personality Art Laboe was unusually dispassionate in assessing the competition posed by country music. In a 1951 interview withWestern Music, a new fan magazine whose very existence demonstrated the strength of the local country music market, Laboe lavished praise on the genre. He told the writer from the magazine that he frequently mixed country with pop songs during his daily radio program, and predicted a glowing future for the local country music industry. “It seems that western music has arrived and is here to stay,” he said.¹

Today, in...

Country musicians rarely made the society page, so when theAntelope Valley Pressasked to interview Spade and Ella Mae Cooley at the couple’s massive new ranch home in 1960, the couple quickly consented. Newcomers to the Antelope Valley, an area that was rapidly becoming the rural playground of the Hollywood jet set, the Cooleys showed off their twelve-hundred-acre ranch and talked about the television bandleader’s plans to build a fifteen-million- dollar Disneyland-style water theme park in the area. The newspaper’s reporter admired the surrounding chaparral, the family powerboat, and other toys Cooley and his sons paraded before thePress...

Merle Haggard was not only a bit bewildered at the reception of his first public performance of “Okie from Muskogee” but also under the impression that he was being attacked. A thirty-two-year-old country music artist from California’s Central Valley, Haggard was said to have written the song while touring the southeastern seaboard in 1969. He introduced the newly penned composition to a live audience at the noncommissioned officers club in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “It was a small club and the crowd had been exceptionally dead,” Haggard later told a reporter. “But then we sang ‘Okie’ and the whole place...