Oklahoma

We all grew up listening to Eric Clapton’s versions of “Cocaine” and “After Midnight” thinking they were pretty swell and Clapton’s songs. What we didn’t know was that they were not his but written by JJ Cale, whose original versions are, in my opinion, a lot better. Cale’s laid-back guitar never rushes and never over-states. Deep in the pocket, Cale’s brilliance shines in songs like “Crazy Mama” and “Magnolia.” We listened to JJ Cale coming over the 21 in Central Idaho over the Ponderosa Scenic Byway, easing into the Sawtooth Mountains and also coming over the North Cascades Highway on our way home.

Like the Flaming Lips and Woody Guthrie, JJ Cale is from Oklahoma, which strangely or maybe not so strangely, is the home of a lot of good musicians. One has to ask, Why? After living in the Midwest for a while, I became partial to writer Susan E. Hinton’s assertion that there is a lot more intellectual and political freedom in the fly-by states, the “real country.” Hinton still lives in Tulsa, by choice, even after living in my beautiful homeland of Northern California for three years. She justifies her decision to stay in Oklahoma by saying that in Oklahoma, there is a “freedom of thought,” which comes as a result of “the cultural ignorance.” Thankfully, a lot of Midwesterners (and others who live in either more rural or “disconnected” areas) don’t feel the need to follow the fashions coming from New York and California. Hinton cites her son who left home and reported that he missed Oklahoma because of this purported unawareness of the rest of the world. “When I was living in Hartford,” her son says, “everyone seemed to think whatever was emanating from New York City. In San Francisco, what San Francisco thinks is what everyone thinks. But in Tulsa, I could use my own brain to form my own opinions.” [p. 366]. This might be a sweeping generalization, but there is a lot more creativity—in music, arts and thought—in the Midwest than many people living on the coasts might think. I admired the Midwesterners’ original thoughts, particularly when I was living in Lawrence, Kansas. Just sitting on the patio of Free State Brewery on Mass Street, the main drag that rambles through Lawrence, my heart was warmed knowing that people in the heartland were engaged with the world but disconnected enough from “mainstream America” to reinvent a new America. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t places in the heartland that aren’t plagued by bigotry, but it doesn’t exculpate the self-anointed “broad-minded” people of the cities. Being in the middle of nowhere in a fly-by state like Kansas, I felt like we were also at the center of the universe because it was possible to have a more immediate impact on what was going on.