Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

384 With Amusement for Allmother and home and flag all of the time.” Some country songs answeredthe wishes of Ritter and other Americans who resented “the protest stuff”and longed for more tranquil times. The best-selling country single of 1969was Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” which became a kind of anthemto defenders of traditional values. Haggard had been riding throughOklahoma when his tour bus passed a road marker: “Muskogee—19miles.” A band member laughed: “Hell, I’ll bet they don’t smoke marijuanain Muskogee.” The comment inspired Haggard, who took only twentyminutes to write the hit song about small-town America, where citizenswere patriotic and spurned countercultural lifestyles. 93In 1969, the tensions within country music were evident in The JohnnyCash Show (1969–71). That year ABC had signed Cash, already a countryicon, to a Saturday night show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the siteof The Grand Ole Opry. Cash chose Bob Dylan as his first guest, a choicethat unquestionably raised eyebrows among some country fans. Threeyears earlier, when Dylan, well into his search for creative discovery, visitedNashville to make his album Blonde on Blonde, he was virtually a stranger.“All we knew was that Dylan looked very strange to us,” said a member ofthe backup band. “We were still what you’d call rednecks.” But Cash hadadmired Dylan for some time, defending him after the 1965 Newport FolkFestival incident, and recording some of his songs. Not everyone in Nashvilleshared Cash’s admiration. When Dylan’s friends Joni Mitchell and GrahamNash came to town to watch the TV show, they encountered considerablehostility. According to their manager: “People yelled, called them shaggyhairsand hippies. They felt unsafe.” Shortly thereafter, Cash again courtedcontroversy—with country fans as well as the ABC network. The issue involveda song that Kris Kristofferson had written, “Sunday MorningComing Down.” “Now we got our own pet hippie,” some critics scoffed atKristofferson, who wore a beard and long hair. ABC wanted Cash to changea drug reference in the song: the word stoned. While Kristofferson watchednervously from the balcony, Cash defied the network by leaving the songintact. The struggle for country music’s soul was heating up. 94Changes were also buffeting the movie industry, which was stilltrying to find its way in the television age. Grand epics such as Spartacus(Stanley Kubrick, 1960) and Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) continuedto have box-office appeal, but some, like Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,1963), The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965), and The Bible(John Huston, 1966), were busts. Family movies such as Mary Poppins(Robert Stevenson, 1964) and The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)reaped substantial dividends, but Doctor Doolittle (Richard Fleischer, 1967)flopped. 95As the studios searched for winning formulas and audiences, they were