‘Proud to Be An Okie’ explains the subtext behind all that hee-ing and haw-ing

If ever a book needed a soundtrack, it’s Peter La Chapelle’s Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. He manages to write about some of the best times and hot bands of the past century while simultaneously avoiding a direct examination of what the honky-tonks looked, smelled and sounded like. It’s a little depressing—five pages in, and you’re ready to let Faron Young wine you up.

You do get the history, of course—but in scholarly dribs and drabs; North Hollywood’s legendary Palomino club (one of the longest-lived Eisenhower-era honky-tonks) actually gets left off a map of the nightspots. And if you want to read about the Foothill Club—which was at 1922 Cherry Avenue in Signal Hill until about six or seven years ago—you must consult the index.

This isn’t Honky-Tonk 101—too bad, because I would study the hell out of that. This is the story of how country transitioned politically from left-wing to right-wing—a trajectory commonly marked, perhaps, by Woody Guthrie’s rise in popularity and radio on the one hand, and Merle Haggard’s huge hit “Okie From Muskogee” on the other.

It’s all here; La Chapelle’s footnotes section seems almost longer than the book and (full disclosure) for our Foothill stories in the OC Weekly and the Press-Telegram respectively, The District’s Dave Wielenga and I both get mentioned.

But if you want a Behind the [Country] Music, deconstruct this book you must. And that’s probably a bad idea, because behind its rimless spectacles, Proud to Be an Okie is a really great story of Southern California and the nation; of how a group of disenfranchised immigrants and migrants went from breadlines (Great Depression) to headlines.

Yes, headlines. Somewhere toward the back, there’s what should be an epic photo of movie cowpoke Roy Rogers—a former leftie union supporter—joining the Ronald Reagans in 1961 for “the color guard at the ‘youth night’ of the Southern California School of Anti-Communism.”

Yeah. They don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, indeed.

PROUD TO BE AN OKIE: CULTURAL POLITICS, COUNTRY MUSIC, AND MIGRATION TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BY PETER LACHAPELLE | SOFTCOVER | 350 PGS | UCPRESS.EDU | $24.95

Tags: country, foothill club, great depression, Long Beach, okies, palomino club