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Okie was the making of Haggard. The single sold 264,000 copies the first year, and the album of the same name 855,000. The song put Haggard into the millionaire class, which he did not mind. It also earned him a reputation as a spokesman for the right wing, which he did. Haggard is a patriot, all right, but his own kind: instinctive, apolitical. When George Wallace sent him a feeler asking him to campaign in the Alabama Governor's re-election campaign in 1970, Haggard refused.
He sang at the White House in March 1973, and was proud to stand in the reception line next to Richard Nixon. But only two months later, he had turned bitterly pessimistic about the Nixon Administration because of Watergate and other troubles he spotted around the country. By then, crisscrossing the U.S., Haggard had already found gas hard to buy at truck stops, found too many families hard put to feed themselves. Last fall, two months before the start of the auto-industry layoffs, he came out with a song annealed to the nation's mood. If We Make It Through December has already sold 468,000 copies and Haggard expects it to outsell Okie:
Got laid off down at the factory, and their timin's not the greatest in the world.
Heaven knows I've been working hard,
wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl.
That kind of complaint goes back at least as far as Woody Guthrie's eloquent pleas for the migratory workers during the Depression. Commercial country was born in the 1920s out of an amalgamation of American folk, British airs and hymns, and Negro gospel and blues. The New York record companies sent their men South to make wax discs of such performers as Samantha Bumgarner and Fiddlin' John Carson. Then they found the Carter Family, hillbilly virtuosos from Virginia, and the first idol of country, Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933). Country was off and running.
In the 1930s, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers made the singing cowboy a national hero. With the mobilization of the entire population in World War II, regional music styles began to meld. A languorous hybrid known as country-and-western was born, in which the still simple music of the Southeast was blended with the more sophisticated instrumentation (steel guitar, drums, even horns) of the Far West. This wedding of styles produced, among others, Merle Travis, Webb Pierce and the late Hank Williams. The rise of rock 'n' roll (notably Elvis Presley, who began his career singing country-and-western in Memphis) eclipsed country in the late 1950s. But by the late 1960s rock, the child of rock 'n' roll, was embracing country sounds.
Model Railroad. Today country-music stars may sing about riding the freights or drinking a brew, but many go home to antebellum mansions or $500,000 ranch houses, buy Cadillacs and keep houseboats around for the weekends. A trend now is toward private jets, but many country stars, Haggard included, prefer to own their own buses—huge $100,000 cruisers decked out with color TVs, recording equipment, separate quarters for star and band, sometimes even separate buses.