Today, the word “Okie” refers to someone who lives or has roots in Oklahoma. Many Okies wear the title with pride. However, when the word came into heavy usage in the early 20th century that wasn’t the case. At that time, it was used by native Californians as a slur for those who traveled from the Dust Bowl-stricken areas of the country to look for migrant work as a means of survival. How did the meaning of the word change so much? Merle Haggard, that’s how.
Farmers in the Great Plains region over-tilled the land to grow crops. Then, when droughts struck the region in the 1930s, millions of acres of land centered around the Oklahoma panhandle became the Dust Bowl. Winds raged, and dust storms choked the land. It looked and felt like the end of the world for those in parts of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. As a result, millions of residents fled to the verdant lands of California in hopes of finding work tending fields to make enough to survive.