"RIP. Country music great ""Merle Haggard had wanted to follow ""Okie from Muskogee"" with ""Irma Jackson,"" a song that dealt head-on with an interracial romance between a white man and a Black American woman. His producer Ken Nelson and Capitol Record execs discouraged him from releasing it as a single....After ""The Fightin' Side of Me"" was released instead, Haggard later commented to the Wall Street Journal, ""People are narrow-minded. Down South they might have called me a n****r…"
{}