Ken Burns, Vince Gill, and Professor "Chowderhead"--Time to stop using Okie as a smear

            In the late 1970s I talked at the English Department of a major California university on the "Composition and Meaning of Pudd'nhead Wilson" and the next day on "Aesthetic Implications of Textual Evidence in American Fiction."   I had astonishing new information and new ideas about the creative process (it begins, it continues, it ends) and the process of reading (evidence about how we all make sense of nonsense or inadvertent meanings). The dominant theory of editing, Greg’s rationale of copy-text, I could show, took no account of creativity: it was perfect for belated corrections but delusory in cases of revision.  The departmental chairman was intrigued with what I had done with the work of James J. Gibson and the cognitive psychologists.  The other professors, young and old, were playing games I recognized from Northwestern, when the senior professors, telling themselves mournfully that in a few more years "all the really eminent men" would be gone, had savagely feasted on a series of young candidates.  (What ever happened to that brilliant Mr. Greene?  Did he disintegrate entirely on the way back to New Haven?)  No one besides the chairman and one faculty member would talk about the new sort of information I had presented and how profound its implications might be for literary study.  At the reception all they wanted to know, these people (who, dead or living, are hardly visible on Google now, having coasted along with no lasting achievements) ignored the content of my speeches and wanted to know, or confirm, what my accent was.  What was that accent?  I was Southern, having lived in about seven years, all told, in Texas and seven in Oklahoma, and three more years in Louisiana.  I could not say forthrightly "I'm an Okie."  I had been trying for too many years to get away from being an Okie.

          I should have been able to accept who I was. I had begun learning to be at ease with myself as an Okie after an hour with Ken Kesey at USC on 24 April 1975. Kesey said his roots were Texas but he thought of himself as an Okie. My diary offers a stripped down account: “Meeting Kesey = a major event. Feel strangely that if I knew him for a full day he would do more to free me from bitterness about the past than psychologists and therapists could ever do. A man like Whitman.”   It took a long while, but Kesey by talking about how he had always identified as Okie led me to change my own attitude toward being one.
          My Southern accent had not hindered me at Northwestern during my two spells there between 1959 and 1968. It never hindered me at the great eastern libraries I worked at, from the Library of Congress north to Boston. Only one person brought it up my being a Southerner, and brought it up on every possible occasion with this smirking formula: “Hershel hails from Oklahoma.”  What compelled the relentlessly self-aggrandizing professor to do this, and continue doing it year after year?       
             “Chowderhead,” Harrison Hayford called him, and I have been having to deal these last weeks with new examples of his intellectual confusion and downright erroneous proclamations. Ken Burns’s new series on Country Music has brought my attention back to “Chowderhead”-- and “Okie” and even “Oklahoma” as slur terms. Several years ago I wrote an eight-page single-spaced history of how the term “Okie” came to be so contemptuous. After Ken Burns, and after Vince Gill’s calling his new album “OKIE,” I will find a way to publish it.