“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”
This is a picture I took of Señora gleefully experiencing a ménage-à-trois, well okay, a ménage-à-doobie, with two music icons painted on the wall of a cannabis store in Muskogee, by gawd, Oklahoma.
Of course, the person on the right is the legendary Bob Marley, the Reggae musician, famous for his advocacy of the legalization of cannabis and giant spliffs.
The cowboy hat wearing gentleman is none other than Merle Haggard, one of the most notable country music stars of the 60s and 70s. He co-wrote and performed what is indubitably the most famous song, ever, about Muskogee, Okie From Muskogee.
If there are any other songs about Muskogee I am not aware of them. Well, Greg Jacobs, a history teacher and musician from Checotah, OK, has a song or two with references to Muskogee.
When I was a kid going back to my grandmother’s house in Checotah, Muskogee was the “big city” that most of the rural folk preferred when they could not find what they needed in Checotah. Tulsa was way too big!
Okie From Muskogee starts out with the following lyrics:
We don’t smoke marijuana in MuskogeeWe don’t take our trips on LSDWe don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street‘Cause we like livin’ right, and bein’ free
We don’t make a party out of lovin’But we like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ wooWe don’t let our hair grow long and shaggyLike the hippies out in San Francisco do
Having lived in Muskogee for three years in the early 70s, having visited there all my life, I am here to testify that those lyrics have never been true, even when Haggard wrote the tune, except perhaps the part about burning draft cards.
I find the above picture a bit of a synopsis of my marriage to Señora.
One description of Señora might be a Reggae listening Bu-Jew (sometimes referenced as JewBu), but she is much more complex than just that.
Then there is me, my provenance is such a mixture that I generally describe it as a military brat who morphed into a computer gypsy. I definitely have my redneck side. While country music is not my go to genre, by spells, I do listen to a fair amount of it.
There has got to a joke in there somewhere – a Bu-Jew and a redneck walk into a bar…
Just as an aside, the Wikipedia article linked to about Merle Haggard is a very interesting read. He definitely started down the wrong path in life which made this line from the article so compelling:
In 1972, after Haggard had become an established country music star, then-California governor Ronald Reagan granted Haggard a full and unconditional pardon for his past crimes.