Okie Music Shows a Melancholy Wit

Music--fiddle, guitar, harmonica--often relieved the melancholy of roadside Okie camps. Among those rural virtuosos sprang songwriters who added a distinctive flavor to California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Woody Guthrie was an Okie, and Buck Owens and Paul Westmoreland. Merle Haggard (“Okie from Muskogee”), was born in a converted boxcar in Oildale, Calif., to Okie migrants. Later he lived in an $800,000 house with the representation of a guitar etched into the swimming pool.

The Okies also brought a pungent wit. They used humor as a response to the hostility that greeted them in California. A favorite Okie ditty of the ‘30s:

The miners came in ‘49,

The whores in ’51.

When they bumped together

They produced the native son.

Dale Scales of Bakersfield, an Okie who became wealthy selling farmland, says his father gave him an Okie adage to ponder when he was growing up:

“Son, we Okies weren’t much, but remember this: When we left Oklahoma and came to California the IQs of both states went up.”