Now, Ken Burns and Vince Gill, I have this book on Okies. Hayford called me "THE most important Melville scholar of all time," but what I really know about is being an Okie.

            There's a glad-handing self-aggrandizing professor who delighted (when I went to meetings) at introducing me as "Hershel Parker, who hails from Oklahoma." By his incompetence he caused so much confusion to scholars that Harrison Hayford called him Chowderhead.  He did not make Sambo jokes in my hearing, but to a fellow of his degree of sophistication it was always open season on Okies. I was in fact born in Oklahoma, and for a long time I bought into the shame of being a Depression Okie--ashamed of having to drop out of high school and earn money, ashamed of incurring a then-deadly and contagious disease, TB, and other health problems. I managed an imperfect autodidactic education as I worked in 1952-1959 as a railroad telegrapher.  I was left with damage to my body which has bedeviled me every day into extreme old age, although I learned to take better care of myself and ran almost ever day for almost 4 decades, and jogged one mile even today (and walked back). This is a good time to talk about Okies, thanks to Ken Burns and just now thanks to Vince Gill, who calls his new album OKIE.
            I have been working for 10 years or so on who the Okies were. I began by seeing if there were any documents on my American ancestors, for one of the truths of migrating and impoverished  people is that they lose family memory. Some are lucky enough to have a few chroniclers in the family, as James Webb was. By contrast, I had two tiny anecdotes about great grandfathers. Now I have over 4,000 documents in one file called GLIMPSES and have a much larger file called ORNERY PEOPLE about family history in relation to Southern history. Maybe I will change the name because it is still more defiant than I need to be.
            Other work got in the way, particularly the unplanned-for Library of America HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS. I still have to get books and papers off to the Berkshire Athenaeum, but then I can turn to ORNERY PEOPLE, which I have been hinting at for years.
Here is the start of the article on OKIE as I wrote it several years ago: 

              In the mid-1930s, newspaper writers did not know where the refugees or migrants streaming into California were coming from. From the “Dust Bowl,” said many, not realizing that the true Dust Bowl was pretty much restricted to the area the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and the adjacent areas in northeast New Mexico, southeast Colorado, and southwest Kansas, and not knowing that relatively few of those who left the Dust Bowl actually went to California. On 14 July 1937 the San Bernardino County Sun under the headline “70,000 ‘Dust Bowl’ Refugees Homeless in San Joaquin Valley” identified the newcomers as from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, although Arkansas had suffered drought but it was not in the Dust Bowl. On 25 July 1937 the Fresno Bee reported concern about “the influx of middle westerners and dust bowl refugees”—maybe 1,000,000 of them, but did not particularize “middle westerners.” The Burlingame Times on 28 July 1937 under the heading “Cotton Crop Here Lure To Dust Bowl Refugees” declared that “many thousands of southern farmers and refugees from the midwestern ‘dust bowl’ have invaded the San Joaquin valley.” Again, “southern” and “midwestern ‘dust bowl’” were not further specified. An article by Sam Jackson in the Charleston (SC) News and Courier on 8 August 1937 said that officials were surprised that “migration from the western dust bowl has increased in 1937”—an estimated influx of 100,000 as compared to 84,000 in 1936; “western dust bowl” was not further located.  The Santa Cruz Sentinel on 8 April 1938 announced that “Dust Bowl Migrants Are Roaming State for Work” and went on to specify that the migrants had been “cut loose from their farms in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas by disaster and mechanization of farming.” The El Paso Herald-Post on 28 July 1938 (“Dust Bowl Migrants Squat On California in Squalor”) quoted migrants’ explanations for why they had left their homes (they were not able to make a living on a farm, they staying on a farm till the dust drove them out, they stayed till the drought ran them out). The reporter continued: “These are typical answers as the inquiring visitor makes the rounds of California’s squatter tent and shack towns, inhabited by one-time share croppers, tenant farmers, independent farmers, casual[tie]s of depression in towns—nomads who have migrated here from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona and elsewhere in search of work and mild winters.”

          Gradually the migrants began to be identified as coming mainly from Oklahoma. On 8 August 1837 the Charleston News and Courier printed this caption to a grim illustration: “Crowding of families in ‘jungle’ tents, like this one in ‘Little Oklahoma’ hear Tulare, Calif., makes authorities fearful of the health and morals of dust bowl fugitives.” The accompanying text offered a definition: “the ‘Okies,’ as the refugees are called (from Oklahoma), occupy forest service camp grounds,” but the “overflow goes into ‘jungles’ of tents and shabby shacks which authorities view as breeding places of disease, crime, immorality and general misery.” “Okies” had been the innocuous nickname of the Norman football team and had been current in jocular use, often among Oklahomans. On 9 August 1938 the Riverside Daily Press printed an optimistic article (“Flow of Indigents to State Slowing Down”): “’Okies’ from Oklahoma, and ‘Arkies’ from Arkansas are few and far between,” reported Robert Campbell,” an officer at a state plant quarantine border station in Blythe. More realistically, in a lecture reported in the Santa Cruz Sentinel for 25 August 1938 Frank Emery Cox declared “Tobacco Road has really come to California and for the first time in history, this state has rural slums and unlike the tenements of the large cities, they are populated by ‘poor white trash’ from other states. Approximately 60 per cent of these migrants arrived from six states of the south and southwest. Oklahoma contributed almost 26 per cent, or one out of every four.” On 26 October 1938 the New Orleans Times-Picayune showed that the terms “Arkies” and “Okies” had spread across the country: “Not since the gold rush of ’49 has there been such a migration to California. So many have flocked there from Arkansas and Oklahoma they are called Arkies and Okies.” A 19 November 1938 article in the Oakland Tribune, “Bankers Would Colonize Dust Bowl Migrants on California Farms,” repeated this terminology while attaching it to a more general geographical area than Oklahoma and Arkansas: “Middle Westerners--known in California as Oakies [sic] and Arkies—trailed into the State, their meagre belongings piled high on ancient automobiles.” The financial theorist Roger W. Babson in the Brownsville Heraldo of 3 September 1939 used Okie to be inclusive—“During the past few years, thousands of ‘Okies’ (refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and Colorado), the unemployed, the footlo[o]se, and the half-baked from all states have drifted to Southern California where it is warm and sunny the year round. On 25 October 1939 the Charleston (SC) Evening Post, influenced by John Steinbeck, whose latest book had been a sensation starting in April, used “Okies” as an inclusive term for all the migrants: “the thousands of ‘Okies,’ dust-bowl refugees from Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas [sic] and Texas, and thousands of Mexicans from southern California, sat on their heels while the sun dried out fields dampened by yesterday’s rain. Many of these are types portrayed by characters in John Steinbeck’s controversial novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’” The refugees from Oklahoma in fact constituted only xxxx [check]% of the 1930s migrants to California, but even before The Grapes of Wrath was published the two terms “Okies” and “Arkies” covered most of the migrants except when “Okies” was the catch-all term for all the migrants.  Far into the reception of The Grapes of Wrath the Abilene Reporter-News on 21 December 1939 printed a new scare headline—“NEGROES COMING!” A Stanford professor says that “a great migration of negroes from the cotton lands of the South to California is only a matter of time. When it comes, he added, the recent migration of white victims of the dustbowl—the Okies and the Arkies—will seem trifling by comparison. (Some negroes and whites came together, as it turned out, on Kaiser trains bringing workers to wartime shipyards—but in disproportion; the Portland Oregonian on 3 October 1942 said 84 negroes had arrived out of 1160 men.)