For The Sake Of The Song: Leon Russell “Home Sweet Oklahoma”

Leon Russell’s world exploded in 1970. He’d been a leading studio musician in Los Angeles for over ten years, a key member of the famed Wrecking Crew, and he had been instrumental in the success of Delaney & Bonnie’s “Accept No Substitute” which was one of the albums of 1969, and a major influence on leading musicians at the time with its downhome take on country, blues and blue-eyed soul. He also released his debut solo album, “Leon Russell”, in early 1970 on the label he had formed with English producer Denny Cordell, and the record included the cream of the then English rock aristocracy. He had also put together the band for a Joe Cocker tour and acted as band leader for what became the live “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”, which arguably did more to raise Russell’s profile with the general listening public than Cocker’s.

In August Russell found himself in London, and with his busy schedule, he was also recording tracks for his second album on an ad hoc basis. While in London he recorded three tracks that ultimately ended up on 1971’s “Leon Russell & The Shelter People” with Friends In England which included Dominos Carl Radle and Jim Gordon, Rolling Stone Jim Price on organ, and the Grease Band’s Chris Stainton on guitar, and one of the tracks was ‘Home Sweet Oklahoma’. Russell was not only a very gifted musician he was also a very complicated person, and while from the outside he may have seemed to have everything in 1970, he was already beginning to have concerns about the impact of the music business. He had left home in Tulsa in 1959 and made the trip on a Greyhound to Los Angeles as a 17-year-old and made a life for himself on the West Coast. However, the lyrics to ‘Home Sweet Oklahoma’ reveal an element of homesickness for the slower-paced life Tulsa offered, and the tempos of the song reflect the moods described by the lyrics, from slow and mournful full to energised and positive.

Russell did return to Tulsa and set up a Shelter Records office there, plus he built three studios, Shelter Church Studio in a former church, Paradise Studios in a lakeside setting, and a home studio which provided a significant boost to the local music scene, and helped consolidate the Tulsa Sound. Not everyone was happy with this influx of hippies and longhairs into what was at the time, a very conservative area.  Merle Haggard had released ‘Okie From Muskogee’ in 1969 which was seen as a redneck anthem, though Haggard had written the song as more of a satire and commentary than an endorsement of the views expressed in the lyrics. As an Okie himself, Russell knew the conflicts between the two communities, and in 1973 he went to Nashville to record an album of country standards from the ‘40s and ‘50s with many of the original musicians. The resultant album, “Hank Wilson’s Back’, together with his public friendship with Willie Nelson helped bridge the divide between the hippies and the rednecks, something Russell couldn’t have imagined when he wrote and recorded ‘Home Sweet Oklahoma’.

When his partnership with Denny Cordell collapsed in the mid-70s Russell left Tulsa for the second time, and after a few years back on the West Coast he landed in Nashville where he was based for over thirty years. He released four volumes as his alter ego Hank Wilson during his career.

“When I was just a young man I was barely seventeen
I went out to Hollywood chasing my dreams
Dusty Oklahoma was all I’d ever seen
And I was getting older

Memories of the Greyhound fade and quickly pass
The lonely restroom windows, the empty hourglass
Reflect the human hunger of the questions I never asked
I only had my time for spending

But I’m going back to Tulsa one more time
Going back to Tulsa one more time
Going back to Tulsa one more time
I’ve got home sweet Oklahoma on my mind”