F4 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2019 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
of Baptist preachers and rich oil-
men. The Blue Door is a progres-
sive’s sanctuary in a state where
all 77 counties went for Trump.
Some of the best folk and Ameri-
cana artists have performed on the
venue’s stage, beneath a dusty
banjo and a trumpet in a low build-
ing where zithers and harps were
once made. But Johnson, whose
expletives flow in varying octaves,
wants the nation to confront its
past and rewire its future.
“You’ve got a country founded
on genocide and built by slaves,
so, well, you’ve got a lot of digging
out to do,” he says as wind blows
through a half-open door. “I want
musicians to make a stand when
they can. I’m asking people to
speak out. Look at Woody. He was
all about seeing what you could
do in your own community. I don’t
think music changes anybody,
otherwise the Beatles and Jimi
Hendrix would have changed us.
But music can inspire the work
that brings about change.”
Republicans have a roughly
175,000-vote advantage in Okla-
homa, which has only one Demo-
crat in Congress. Liberal musi-
cians have held fundraising con-
certs for voter registration drives,
better schools, Democratic candi-
dates and medical marijuana.
They have sung against fracking
and protested in front of an Immi-
gration and Customs Enforcement
center. Many have written songs
that speak to the times, including
John Fullbright’s anti-fascist “Fat
Man,” Jared Deck’s “Great Ameri-
can Breakdown” and Peggy John-
son’s scathing ballad “Sock Pup-
pet,” which tells Trump “the world
is exploding while you’re out cop-
ping a feel.”
“We’re pretty much ground zero
in Oklahoma,” says Baxter, who
spent 35 years working for the Air
Force. “I know these Trump folks.
How they are, what they think. It
started with the demise of the
World War II Republicans and
the creating of a distrust for gov-
ernment. We’re in the deepest,
darkest part of it in this state. I call
them oil Baptists. I call it fascism.”
State of contradictions
Mary Catherine Reynolds, a
married, gay singer-songwriter,
once lived in the house that be-
came the Blue Door. In those days,
she called it “Hotel Bohemia.”
She says tolerance has improved
in the state in recent years, despite
radio and TV conservatives “who
you just wonder what planet
they’re living on. But we have to
get through to the other side. Just
being disenchanted with Trump
is not enough. They want to blame
immigrants, women, homosexuals
for their problems. But it’s the
banks doing it to them.”
Oklahoma is a map of Amer-
ica’s contradictions and ironies,
its noble aspirations and scarier
tendencies. It can be brash and
broken in a single breath. The
frontier spirit cuts deep, the opioid
scourge hit hard. The state houses
the archives of Guthrie, an Okla-
homa native, and Bob Dylan, two of
the world’s most socially con-
scious songwriters. It is also home
to the etched walls and reflecting
pool at the memorial for 168 people
killed in 1995 when anti-govern-
ment terrorist Timothy McVeigh
exploded a Ryder truck full of
fertilizer in front of the federal
building in Oklahoma City.
Across windblown hills and
lowlands lie the Choctaw, Chero-
kee and Chickasaw nations. In
the Greenwood district of Tulsa,
African Americans, including
those at Wanda J’s, which serves
catfish and mashed potatoes, are
reviving what was known as the
“Black Wall Street,” where in 1921
white mobs attacked residents
and burned homes and businesses,
leaving thousands homeless and
up to 300 dead in what is known
as the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Elizabeth Warren was born
here, but Fox News and the likes
of Scott Pruitt, forced by ethics
scandals to resign as Trump’s head
of the Environmental Protection
Agency, provide the talking points.
Conservative Bluegrass musicians
sing of cowboy hat patriotism; the
governor this year signed a law
making it legal to carry a gun with-
out a permit. Church hymns and
anti-abortion homilies ring over
fields that wrought the Depres-
sion-era Dust Bowl, and for miles
approaching Oklahoma City, the
Devon Energy Corp. tower glim-
mers like a crystal blade flung
down from heaven.
“This used to be a pretty prog-
ressive state,” says Brad Piccolo,
singer-songwriter for the Tulsa-
based Red Dirt Rangers, which re-
corded a live album at the Blue
Door and performs at the annualWoody Guthrie Folk Festival in
Okemah. “They’re preaching
politics from the pulpit. There’s
veiled racism. Things have flipped.
Trump is making people say things
they once thought but never said
about racism and immigration.
The only bit of hope came when
Democrats and Republicans
got together to legalize medical
marijuana.”
A slight man in jeans, Piccolo
pets his dog, Ringo, and walks
through an irrigated backyard
to six varieties of marijuana plants.
Medicinal, of course, although he
started growing way back when
he had to wear camo pants. The
grandson of an Italian coal miner,
Piccolo has been called a “commie”
(he prefers “compassionate capi-
talist”) and brims with truisms:
“A libertarian is nothing but a Re-
publican who smokes weed.”
The invective against immi-
grants bothers him. It’s a sin, he
says, to stay silent if you see a pic-
ture of a child in a cage along the
U.S.-Mexican border. His song
“Red State Blues,” which has
earned him threats that he might
wake up in a hospital, is unflinch-
ing: “I’ve got the Red state blues /
I’m paying my dues in Oklahoma /
If they find out you’re a liberal /
They’ll try to put you in a coma /
Rednecks waving Rebel flags /
KKK and the Nazis in drag / I’ve got
the Red state blues.”
“Those feelings have been in
me for a long time,” says Piccolo,
who keeps ashes of dead friends
above his album collection, which
includes Tito Puente and Hank
Williams Jr. “It’s the influence of
Woody Guthrie. The most powerfulsong comes to you in 10 minutes.
That was a 10-minute song with
no filter. You know, I took one of
those tests and found out I’m left
of Gandhi.”
He laughs and climbs into a car.
He drives past Art Deco buildings
to the Woody Guthrie Center,
funded by progressive billionaire
George B. Kaiser. Guthrie, who
died in 1967 and wrote “This Land
Is Your Land,” a song that says
America belongs to the poor and
dispossessed as much as anyone
else, may have found it curious and
amusing that the foundation of a
rich man owns his archives. Piccolo
stops at a glass case and stares at
blistering verses about Trump’s fa-
ther, Fred, scrawled in notebooks.
Fred Trump owned the Brooklyn
building where Guthrie, who ac-
cused Trump of not renting to
blacks, lived in the early 1950s.
One passage read: “I suppose
that Old Man Trump knows just
how much racial hate / He stirred
up in that bloodpot of human
hearts / When he drawed that col-
ored line / Here at his Beach Haven
family project.”
Those lines from El Paso to
Ferguson, Mo., still divide much
of America. Deana McCloud, the
center’s executive director, walks
among Guthrie’s lyrics every day,
listening to his strumming and the
wire pitch of his voice. The phrase
on Guthrie’s guitar read: “This
machine kills fascists.” He has,
she says, never lost his relevance,
especially in this age of racist
tweets and contempt of the other.
“Unfortunately, history will
not look kindly on us, nor should
it,” McCloud says. “Our musiciansstill realize they can change the
status quo. Woody was our exam-
ple. The legacy is strong with our
Oklahoma artists. Many of them
are independent and not tied to
a big company. They don’t have
a record label telling them what
they can say.”
Piccolo returns home to his
weed, songs and dog. He offers
water and waves. The road cuts
southwest, past fields and blowing
trees, scattered clouds, trucks
roaring along, MAGA ball caps
resting on dashes, the temperature
edging toward 100. Oklahoma City
rises like a toy set from the earth.
A daughter has left a note for her
dead mother on the chain-link
fence at the bombing memorial:
“We will have been married for 18
years in June, and we have been
blessed with three remarkable
boys. I am going to be the building
principal next year.”No surrender
The Blue Door has ghosts of
its own. Black and white photo-
graphs and posters of musicians
line the walls. Guy Clark. Chris
Smither. Johnny Cash. Jimmy
Webb. Walking into the place is
like getting lost in a Hobbit hut,
eyes and memories everywhere,
a compressed vista of time. John-
son, though, is more iconoclast
than sentimentalist. He’d rather
vilify Trump than romanticize the
past, although he is proud of or-
ganizing Guthrie tribute concerts,
which he began nearly three dec-
ades ago in Austin, Texas, before
moving to Oklahoma.
“Art and music are wonderful,Singing the red-state blues
[Oklahoma,from F1]
“THISused to be a pretty progressive state,” says Brad Piccolo, center, with Red Dirt Rangers bandmates Ben Han, left, and John Cooper. “Things have flipped.”
Kelly Kerr“I DON’T think music changes anybody ... but music can inspire the work that brings about change,” says Blue Door’s Greg Johnson.Michael DownesFor The Times[SeeOklahoma,F5]CULTURAL DIVIDE