Why Merle Haggard Wrote ‘America First,&#...

Twenty years ago, the country legend talked with Variety's chief music critic about what drove him to write the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq-war song, now being revived as the Republican VP candidate's walk-up music

Published Time: 18.07.2024 - 16:31:32 Modified Time: 18.07.2024 - 16:31:32

Twenty years ago, the country legend talked with Variety's chief music critic about what drove him to write the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq-war song, now being revived as the Republican VP candidate's walk-up music.

Country legend Merle Haggard has been brought into the national spotlight again, thanks to vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeatedly using one of the late singer’s anthems as his walk-up music during the Republican convention this week. It’s not one of Haggard’s better-known classic songs the VP pick has adopted, but a later composition that was released in 2005 and didn’t really get a lot of subsequent pickup until now: “America First.”

The Haggard tune played on a loop several times as Vance made his way through the convention floor Monday night, then appeared again Wednesday as walk-up music as the Ohio senator took the stage to deliver his speech. “America First” stood out at the GOP gathering as a song that is legitimately political, unlike the litany of mostly rock oldies being performed live by a house band from Nashville called Sixwire (including Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” — yes, the Bill Clinton convention anthem — that the group played as Vance’s walk-off number).

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Haggard is claimed as a hero by fans on both sides of the political aisle, who were alternately delighted or aggrieved by his music being appropriated by Vance. So what was Haggard’s actual intent in writing “America First”? And would he approve of Vance adopting it for a conservative political campaign?

That last query is impossible to answer with certainty, of course, since Haggard passed away in 2015, and his political views were unpredictable enough in life, let alone in death. But the legend’s purpose in writing the song 20 years ago can at least be addressed with certainty. I interviewed the country great about the tune in 2004, right after he recorded it, for my book “Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music” — along with pinning him down at the time about what his intentions had been in penning “Okie From Muskogee” in the late ’60s. I got some pretty clear answers from Haggard about both songs… along with a surprising, substantial list of which presidents he’d loved or loathed over the years.

George H.W. Bush was a leader who fell into the loathe category for Haggard. “America First” was written in part as an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War protest song. And if that’s the reason Vance picked it as his theme music (apart from the obviously slogan-friendly title), it’s not an inapproriate pick. At the time, Haggard’s song would have reasonably been seen as anti-Republican. And nowadays, the Republican party is anti-Republican, too — or anti-Bush-era-Republican, to be precise, since the party has obviously shifted in the MAGA era to consider Bush nearly a villain, and Vance took time out in his speech to retroactively rail against the Bush-led military intervention in Iraq.

But Haggard’s song was at least as much pro-American-infrastructure as it was anti-interventionism, and it remains to be seen whether Vance and others will advocate in a big way this year for increasing the tax dollars spent on the nation’s transportation systems. Perhaps that part of Hag’s message would have been clearer if he’d kept the full title he was using when he and I first discussed the tune: “Let’s Rebuild America First” (not “put”).

And, of course, whether Haggard would have been against intervening in Ukraine isn’t clear at all. His objections to the Iraq War had less to do with a general belief in nationalism or isolationism than his contention that Bush was lying to the nation about the true motives of the war. He told me he thought it was really probably an oil grab, not national security, and he resented Bush for not leveling about that.

When I talked to him in the fall of 2004, Haggard had just finished recording the song but was still months away from putting it out. He had a slight reticence to release it as part of the album that he was working on at the time, “Chicago Wind.”

Haggard told me, “After we got it cut, I said ‘Why don’t we just leave that stuff off the album, and do an album for once that’s totally about music, don’t have any political undertones at all, or overtones?’ And we thought about it, and we still thought about it… (But producer Jimmy Bowen) says he thinks that the American Merle Haggard fan wants to hear about my opinions as much as they do hear the music, so we should have it in there. It’s a song called ‘Let’s Rebuild America First.’ I guess we’re gonna put it in there—I guess.”

I asked him to elaborate on the song’s theme. “Well, you know, I drive across America, and the highways are messed up, ande our bridges are falling through,” Haggard said. “They had one fall completely through down in Arkansas here a couple years ago. A truck went in the water and eight or nine cars (and) a bunch of people died. Our country’s in the worst shape. What if China invaded us from Mexico? Let’s be real silly here and say, what if they sent troops across down there? How would we get any troops down there?” (Haggard was prone to tangents, and the discussion quickly went from infrastructure concerns to questions he had about what would happen “if somebody would invade this ground.”)

Haggard reiterated to me that he wasn’t a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or liberal. “There are things I go for on both sides of the fence. I can’t be called one or the other, because if I was one of ‘em, I’d want to be the other one. Both of ‘em disappoint me. America is being sold right beneath our feet. Our way of life and everything is going away. Each attempt is named something. Now it’s the Patriot Act. How many years should this thing go on, until we go back to normal and go back to being real Americans?” (Among the things he railed against at length was excessive security, in airports and otherwise, in the wake of 9/11.)

Of Iraq, he said, “I’m going to say as an American that -

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I think they’ve been disingenuous with the public about the reasons why we’re there. And I think the United States of America is mature enough to understand the real reasons…. I’m just disappointed in the fact that (Bush) doesn’t level with us… I think if we’re gonna have to suffer sanctions as Americans when it comes to freedom, then we ought to know the entire picture. They ought to say ‘Hey, we need that oil,’ and whatever the real reason was. And if they’ve got the arc of the covenant over there or something and we need to have it, then I think the American public—Republican and Democrat alike—would appreciate honesty, straightforward honesty. And he’d be the biggest president since Abe Lincoln if he’d just step up and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna cut all the well known crap, and here’s the real deal.’”

So imagine my surprise when Haggard told me he would have voted for Bush… if only…

“I would have voted for G.W., had I voted. I have never voted,” he said. “They took my rights away to vote when I was an ex-con, and I never got used to it, and I just never did vote.”

Who else would he have voted for? “I think Ronald Reagan gets my vote,” Haggard said. “Of course, Kennedy was on his way to doing good, but he got too big for his britches. But I think Ronald Reagan really did the job best… Reagan had that talent of carrying himself right and the acting ability that was necessary for the rest of the world to see what an American is. And on the other hand, I think that our current president has done a terrible job of that. I think he could have taken some acting lessons.”

If Haggard’s appreciation for Reagan, and at least begrudging initial support for Bush, makes you think that he clearly leaned toward the Republican side of the aisle throughout his life, though, think again. Because two years after he released “America First,” Haggard went on to start performing a new song he’d written endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, called “Hillary,” but sometimes known as “Let’s Put a Woman in Charge.”

Imagine if whoever is programming the music at the GOP convention accidentally hit play on that.

In any case, personal freedom and its restriction was a big deal to Haggard. “I don’t want to be on the front lines of a war right now,” he told me, joking, “I’m 67 years old. I don’t want ‘em patting me down. I’m too old to feel it.”

In conclusion, he said, “Look, I love this country more than anybody you ever talked to in your life. That’s my big concern. I’ve enjoyed my life in it, living here. And somebody needs to be aware that there are some things changing and we are eroding as a nation. It’s not good right now. We need to fix our highways, our railroads… and start using some of our own oil and take the cap off the reserves. We’ve got oil reserves around the country that are enormous. They don’t want to bring that up.

“We’ve got farmers down there that are going broke and can’t grow tobacco anymore, because they’ve shut the tobacco industry down. Why don’t they grow corn and hemp and something we can burn in the car, and put this country back to work, and clear up the air at the same time? There’s a lot of sensible things on the table that are totally all possibilities now. They’re not just probabilities or pie in the sky. There’s all kinds of things to do for fuel that would put our inner America back to work. God, why is something like that, so simple, has to be so involved?”

Full disclosure also dictates mentioning that Haggard was capable of some of the greatest seeming non sequiturs of all time, when he got onto what was wrong with America. Like: “Why do people not see those chemical trails in the air? Why do they not care about the beer joints being closed down?” Two questions that have rarely been asked literally in the same breath, but God love Merle Haggard for seeing them as two halves of the same problem.

And, in case you’re wondering what Haggard did have to say that solved the riddle of “Okie From Muskogee,” I won’t make you read my book. Here was his explanation:

“Well, you know what? Not every song is about the guy that’s singing it,” Haggard said, reminding everyone that “Okie” was a character song — but the character was someone very close to him. “That song was really about my dad, and somebody like my dad, who got up at 5 in the morning and went to work and came home and ate supper and went to bed and did the same thing the next day and had nothing else to look forward to, and was happy with a Sunday afternoon together with the family after church. This whole country was full of people like that. And the hippie thing that was occurring in the big cities did not reflect the true majority of America… They called ‘em the silent majority.

“You know, my dad had been dead for several years, but I thought if he was alive, I bet he’d like this song. So it was kind of for my dad, because he was the Okie from Muskogee. He came from Oklahoma to California, and I was born out here, you know, sort of an afterthought in our family. … I think everybody has taken the positive message, finally, that exists in that song, and that is: Whatever you are, be proud to be it. That part of it really doesn’t put anybody down. It doesn’t say ‘They don’t.’ It says, ‘We don’t. We don’t this and we don’t do that.’ And we don’t smoke any marijuana down there in Muskogee, you know!”

Of course, when not in Muskogee, Haggard was a legendary toker, and went on to cut less conservative tracks like “It’s All Gone to Pot,” a duet with Willie Nelson — along with “Hillary,” yet another Hag song the Vance camp probably won’t want to add to the campaign’s Spotify playlist.