Music, Pop Culture

Oklahoma and the Crossroads of Creativity

Roads, airwaves, migrations, traditions and people have crossed here for centuries, carrying Oklahoma creativity into the wider world.

 

 

Stand almost anywhere in Oklahoma and sooner or later something crosses your path.

A highway. A storm front. A migration route. A radio signal. A song. A story.

Maybe that is the clue.

Oklahoma has spent much of its history being described as somewhere between more important places. The South is below us. The Great Plains stretch north. The Ozarks rise to the east. The West opens beyond us. Chicago, Nashville, Los Angeles and New York have traditionally been treated as the great centers of American popular culture.

Oklahoma, meanwhile, has sometimes been saddled with that most dismissive of American labels: flyover country.

But what if being “in between” is precisely the point?

What if Oklahoma’s position in the middle of the country, geographically and culturally, has helped make it one of the places where American stories, traditions, sounds and people have repeatedly crossed paths?

At OKPOP, we have a name for that idea: the Crossroads of Creativity.

It is the belief that Oklahoma is not nowhere. It is the middle of everywhere, a place where cultures have met, sometimes freely and sometimes through painful circumstances, where traditions have mixed and evolved, and where creative ideas have repeatedly traveled outward to influence the wider world.

When OKPOP interviewed Garth Brooks about why so many artists, entertainers and writers seem to emerge from Oklahoma, he dismissed the idea that it was simply coincidence.

“You talk about the crossroads of creativity. It’s in the blood out here.” — Garth Brooks, OKPOP Oral History

The phrase is wonderfully Garth, but the story underneath it may be even more interesting.

Because the Crossroads of Creativity is not really about some magical ingredient in Oklahoma soil. It is about people, place, movement, collision, adaptation and exchange.

It is about what happens when different stories meet.

A Place Between Places

Author and Route 66 historian Michael Wallis once described Oklahoma in an OKPOP oral history with a deceptively simple phrase:

“I find Oklahoma to be a curious place.” — Michael Wallis, OKPOP Oral History

Wallis came to Oklahoma from elsewhere and stayed. Part of what fascinated him was geography. Oklahoma, he said, sits “right at this cusp of really where East meets West.”

But east and west are only the beginning.

Oklahoma is Southern and Western. Plains and Ozarks. Rural and urban. Indigenous and immigrant. Tulsa and Boise City. Red dirt and tallgrass prairie. Oil fields and wheat fields. Church pews, dance halls, rodeos, jazz clubs, movie sets, tribal grounds, football fields, honky-tonks and front porches.

That complexity matters because creativity rarely develops in isolation.

Music borrows. Storytelling evolves. Artists watch one another. Languages collide. Food travels. Technology changes how stories move. Communities inherit traditions and then alter them.

The history of Oklahoma is filled with those encounters. Some produced beauty. Some grew from terrible injustice. Most were complicated.

And understanding that complexity is essential to understanding the creativity that followed.

Before Oklahoma, There Were Stories

The creative history of this place did not begin with statehood, Route 66, radio or Hollywood.

Long before Oklahoma existed as a state, Native peoples lived, traveled, traded, created and told stories across this landscape. In the nineteenth century, federal removal policies forcibly relocated Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole peoples from the Southeast into Indian Territory. Other Native peoples from the Plains, Great Lakes and elsewhere were also confined or relocated into what became Oklahoma. Those histories cannot honestly be described simply as a cheerful “melting pot.” Much of this cultural convergence came through dispossession, violence and forced migration.

Yet Native nations maintained distinct languages, ceremonies, music, visual traditions and ways of understanding the world. Those traditions did not disappear. They continued, adapted and grew. Oklahoma became a place of extraordinary Native cultural diversity, and today thirty-nine federally recognized tribal nations have their headquarters in the state. Music remains integral to Native life here, from family songs and church hymns to ceremonial, hand-game and powwow traditions.

That story continues through artists such as N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Sterlin Harjo, Wes Studi, Jesse Ed Davis and generations of Native painters, musicians, writers, actors, filmmakers and storytellers whose work has expanded the ways Oklahoma and America understand themselves.

The crossroads did not erase individual cultures. At its most creative, it gave those cultures additional places to speak.

Building New Worlds

After the Civil War, another remarkable chapter unfolded.

African American Freedmen associated with the Five Tribes and Black migrants from elsewhere in the United States established communities throughout Indian and Oklahoma territories. Between 1865 and 1920, African Americans created more than fifty identifiable All-Black towns and settlements in what became Oklahoma, more than existed in any comparable concentration elsewhere in the nation. Communities including Boley, Langston, Rentiesville, Red Bird, Taft and Tullahassee became places where Black Oklahomans built schools, churches, newspapers, businesses and local governments while seeking economic opportunity and greater control over their own lives.

Those communities were part of a much larger Black cultural landscape. And eventually, you can hear that landscape.

Oklahoma City’s Deep Deuce became a major jazz district. Muskogee developed its own influential music scene. Territory bands crossed city and state lines, carrying musicians and musical ideas with them. The Oklahoma City Blue Devils became one of the era’s influential territory bands, and Oklahoma musicians including Jimmy Rushing, Charlie Christian, Jay McShann and Claude Williams moved through a regional network connecting Oklahoma to Kansas City and eventually to larger jazz centers across the country. The Oklahoma Historical Society describes the state’s jazz development as a product of cultural confluence, with different genres and communities creating opportunities for experimentation and improvisation.

That is the Crossroads of Creativity in sound.

Something arrives. Something else is already here. They meet. Neither leaves unchanged.

When Oil Built More Than Skyscrapers

By the early twentieth century, those creative communities were about to encounter another force of change: oil.

The great petroleum booms transformed towns almost overnight. Workers, wildcatters, engineers, entrepreneurs and investors arrived from across the country. Fortunes could be made quickly, lost just as quickly and made again somewhere down the road. Oklahoma developed a distinctive oil-field culture built around movement, risk, ambition and reinvention.

But oil money did more than build refineries and office towers. It helped build cultural infrastructure.

Nowhere was that transformation more visible than Tulsa. Oil discoveries at Red Fork and Glenn Pool helped turn a relatively small city into the self-proclaimed “Oil Capital of the World,” and the Art Deco buildings that still define Tulsa today emerged directly from that period of expansion. It also changed what the city believed it could become. Tulsa hosted its first documented opera in 1904, when the streets themselves were still rudimentary. In 1933, even during the Great Depression, a community production of Aïda at Skelly Field drew roughly 6,000 people. Fifteen years later, musicians and civic supporters established what became Tulsa Opera, and in 1956 Ballet Russe dancers Moscelyne Larkin and Roman Jasinski founded Tulsa Ballet Theatre, which grew into an internationally recognized company.

The visual arts tell a similar story. Oilman Waite Phillips built an Italian Renaissance villa in Tulsa during the 1920s, and in 1938 he and Genevieve Phillips gave the 72-room residence to the city for use as an art center. Philbrook Museum of Art opened the following year. Thomas Gilcrease, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation, received an allotment that became part of an early Oklahoma oil field; his success in the petroleum industry helped fund the extraordinary collection that became the foundation of Gilcrease Museum. Farther west, E.W. Marland used part of his fortune to support civic and artistic projects in Ponca City, including the Pioneer Woman competition, which brought twelve prominent sculptors into a public artistic experiment with more than 750,000 votes cast before Bryant Baker’s design was selected.

The story is complicated, of course. Oil wealth was never shared equally. The industry transformed landscapes and communities while producing environmental costs, boom-and-bust instability and enormous disparities of power and wealth. In places such as Osage County, petroleum wealth became entangled with one of the darkest episodes in Oklahoma history. Any honest telling of Oklahoma’s oil age has to hold those truths alongside the cultural legacy it helped finance.

But culturally, something important happened. Money generated by the ground was reinvested into buildings, collections, stages, schools, museums, orchestras, opera, dance, architecture and public art. Those places created new crossroads of their own, bringing local artists together with touring performers, international traditions, wealthy patrons, working families, teachers, students, musicians, dancers and audiences.

The oil came from beneath Oklahoma. Much of the culture it helped make possible traveled far beyond it.

When the Crossroads Started to Swing

Few musical forms illustrate that process better than Western swing.

 

 

Western swing itself refuses to stay inside a clean category. It pulled from fiddle traditions, jazz, blues, popular music, ragtime and the big-band sound of the era. Texas was crucial to its beginnings, but Oklahoma became essential to its development. The Oklahoma Historical Society notes that the music grew to maturity in Tulsa, where Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys found a powerful home.

Radio helped turn a regional sound into something much bigger.

In 1934, Bob Wills began broadcasting on Tulsa’s KVOO. By the following year, Cain’s Ballroom had become the band’s headquarters for broadcasts and dances. KVOO and Tulsa helped give Western swing a voice that could travel far beyond the ballroom.

Think about what was happening. Musicians were standing together in Tulsa playing a music born from multiple traditions. People were dancing to it inside Cain’s. At the same moment, invisible radio waves were carrying that sound into homes, farms and towns across a much larger region.

The crossroads had learned to broadcast.

And suddenly Oklahoma creativity did not have to travel only by foot, horse, train or automobile. It could travel through the air.

The Road Out

Then there was the road.

If one physical object could symbolize Oklahoma’s place in this larger story, it might be a highway shield with two sixes on it.

Route 66 was established as part of the federal highway system in 1926. Tulsa businessman and civic leader Cyrus Avery played a significant role in the national good-roads movement and served on the federal board that helped create the numbered highway system. His advocacy helped ensure that the new Chicago-to-Los Angeles highway came through Oklahoma and Tulsa.

Route 66 historian Rhys Martin told OKPOP that one reason the highway became so important was its role as a connector. Before the interstate era, it intersected with other major highways and helped people move not simply between Chicago and Los Angeles, but outward in nearly every direction.

“This really incredible connector of communities and of people across this vast country.” — Rhys Martin, OKPOP Oral History

That makes Route 66 almost too perfect a metaphor for Oklahoma. People traveled on it. Ideas traveled on it. Music traveled on it. Dreams traveled on it.

And so did hardship.

The mythology of Route 66 is filled with neon signs, roadside diners, motor courts and the promise of freedom. That mythology is real. But it is not the whole story.

Michael Wallis reminded OKPOP that the Mother Road could be a very different experience depending on who was traveling it. During the segregation era, Black travelers encountered restaurants, hotels and towns where they could not safely eat, sleep or sometimes remain after dark. The Negro Motorist Green Book became an essential guide to places where African American travelers could find food, lodging, gasoline and other services.

That complexity belongs in the crossroads story too. A crossroads is not automatically equitable simply because different people pass through it. Sometimes people meet freely. Sometimes doors are closed. Sometimes new roads create possibilities, and sometimes those same roads reveal the boundaries of who was permitted to enjoy them.

The honest Oklahoma story must hold both.

What Oklahoma Carried West

In the 1930s, Oklahoma became associated forever with another movement westward.

Drought, agricultural collapse and the Great Depression pushed enormous numbers of people from the Southwest toward California and other states. Popular culture eventually compressed much of that migration into the phrase “Dust Bowl,” but the historical reality was more complicated. The Oklahoma Historical Society notes that many Oklahoma migrants actually came from southeastern portions of the state rather than from the Panhandle counties most severely affected by the dust storms.

Still, those migrants carried Oklahoma with them. They carried accents, foodways, songs, instruments, church traditions, humor and memories of home.

Woody Guthrie turned the period into song. Even his familiar identity as an Oklahoma “Dust Bowl balladeer” contains a twist. Guthrie was born in Okemah, but many of the dust storms that inspired his famous Dust Bowl recordings were experienced while he was living in the Texas Panhandle.

Once again, the borders get blurry.

The road west also helped carry Southwestern country traditions into California. In Bakersfield, children and descendants of migrants helped develop a harder-edged alternative to the polished Nashville sound. Merle Haggard, born in California to Oklahoma-born parents, became one of its defining voices.

The people left Oklahoma. Oklahoma did not entirely leave them.

From the Real West to the Imagined West

Long before every aspiring filmmaker dreamed of Los Angeles, Oklahoma was already helping manufacture one of popular culture’s most durable fantasies: the American West.

The Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch near Ponca City became more than a working ranch. It developed into a center of Wild West entertainment, spectacle and early motion-picture activity. Michael Wallis described it to OKPOP as the place “where the West of reality and the Wild West of myth came together.” Performers and cowboys associated with the ranch carried those images into touring shows and early film culture, helping turn the lived West into the imagined West consumed by audiences around the world.

That transformation is important. Popular culture does not simply document places. It remakes them. Oklahoma has spent more than a century participating in both sides of that equation: living the story and helping invent the version everyone else sees.

Will Rogers understood that better than almost anyone. Born in Indian Territory as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Rogers moved easily across ranching, Wild West performance, vaudeville, newspapers, radio and motion pictures. He became one of America’s earliest true multimedia celebrities, using humor to make enormous national issues feel like a conversation with a neighbor.

Route 66 would eventually become closely associated with his name. The road and the man made sense together. Both began in the middle of the country. Both traveled outward. And both became part of how America imagined itself.

One Oklahoma Story Becomes Broadway

Sometimes the journey from Oklahoma to the world is even stranger.

In 1931, Claremore-born playwright Lynn Riggs debuted Green Grow the Lilacs, a play set in Indian Territory and rooted partly in the world he knew growing up in Oklahoma. The Broadway production ran only sixty-four performances. That could have been the end of the story.

Instead, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Riggs’s work. The result was Oklahoma!

The musical opened on Broadway in 1943 and changed American musical theater. Its songs, dance and drama were integrated into the storytelling in ways that helped establish a new model for Broadway musicals. Its original cast recording also pioneered the practice of recording a Broadway cast as an album.

And then there is a wonderfully strange twist: when the famous 1955 movie adaptation was made, much of it was filmed in Arizona because, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society’s educational history of the musical, Oklahoma looked too modern.

Even the fictional Oklahoma had to leave Oklahoma. That seems strangely appropriate for this story.

The Tulsa Sound Heads West

A generation later, another group of Oklahoma musicians followed familiar roads toward California.

Tulsa musicians absorbed country, blues, rock and roll, R&B and the loose musical chemistry that grew from playing together. J.J. Cale developed the understated shuffle and vocal style that would profoundly influence musicians far beyond Oklahoma. Eric Clapton turned Cale compositions such as “After Midnight” and “Cocaine” into international hits and adopted elements of Cale’s musical approach in his own recordings.

Leon Russell became one of rock music’s great collaborators, working with artists ranging from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton. Back in Tulsa, his Shelter Records world included artists such as the GAP Band, J.J. Cale, Tom Petty and Phoebe Snow.

Jesse Ed Davis, a guitarist of Comanche, Kiowa and Muscogee heritage, traveled another Oklahoma-to-California path, eventually recording with Taj Mahal, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and others.

Again and again, the pattern appears: Oklahoma musician. Oklahoma community. Road outward. Creative collision. Larger influence.

But there is another part of the story we should not miss. Those artists rarely created alone. They learned from one another. They shared stages. They borrowed records. They traded songs. They helped each other get gigs.

The crossroads was not simply a location. It was a network of relationships.

“It Was Just Kind of in the Air”

When OKPOP asked Joy Harjo why Oklahoma seems to produce so much creativity, she did not point to fame or industry. She remembered childhood.

Growing up in Tulsa, Harjo recalled schools that exposed children to music and art. She remembered hearing the Philharmonic, taking music and art classes, seeing Native art, knowing the names of Native artists and being aware of Tulsa’s Art Deco landscape.

“There seemed to be a, you know, it was just kind of in the air.” — Joy Harjo, OKPOP Oral History

She described Tulsa as “a place where art happened.”

That may be one of the most important answers to the entire question. Creative places do not only produce creativity because famous people happen to be born there. Creative places create conditions.

Someone sees an artist. Someone hears a band. Someone receives a pencil. Someone is taken to a play. Someone has a teacher who notices. Someone’s mother sings. Someone’s friend says, “Do that again.”

And another creative life begins.

Sometimes the Road Leads Into Oklahoma

The Crossroads of Creativity is often described as an export story. Oklahoma creates something, and then it travels outward. But crossroads work in both directions.

Writer Daniel Nayeri came to the United States as a seven-year-old refugee in 1989 and landed in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Before arriving, Nayeri remembered having few creative resources. He imagined stories while walking roads near a refugee community outside Rome. Then he arrived at Will Rogers Elementary School in Edmond and found something that might sound ordinary to anyone who has always had it: classrooms with paper, pencils, art supplies, books and music.

It changed him. His school began mornings with students gathered together singing. Libraries and classrooms gave him places to explore stories. As he learned English, picture books, television and popular culture became part of his education. Eventually, telling classmates the story of how his family had come to America became an early training ground for the storytelling craft that would shape his career.

Later, Nayeri would describe an Oklahoma style of humor as “the humor of the porch,” the long conversation where people circle around stories and ideas together.

That is another kind of crossroads. A boy born in Iran. A refugee journey through Europe. A school in Edmond. American television. Persian memory. Oklahoma humor. Books. All of it eventually becoming part of one storyteller’s voice.

Oklahoma did not simply export that creativity. Oklahoma helped receive it.

Creativity Is Community

Filmmaker Mike Mitchell remembers something similar about growing up in Oklahoma City.

He drew constantly as a child. Teachers noticed his interest and sometimes found ways to let art become part of how he learned. He made comics collaboratively with friends, passing pages back and forth. Later they dragged cameras around Oklahoma and made movies together.

Looking back, Mitchell told OKPOP that Oklahoma felt like “a real community,” a place where people helped each other and where that closeness could generate distinctive storytelling.

His advice to young Oklahoma artists today is wonderfully simple: Make the thing. Use what you have. Show your friends. Try again. Make something together.

That DIY impulse connects an eight-millimeter movie made by kids in Oklahoma City to garage bands, church musicians, student poets, independent filmmakers, painters, comics creators and songwriters all over the state.

Creativity does not always begin with infrastructure. Sometimes infrastructure grows because people started creating anyway.

The Traffic Is Beginning to Run Both Ways

For much of Oklahoma’s modern creative history, talented people often faced a practical decision. If you wanted to make records, maybe you went to Nashville or Los Angeles. If you wanted to work in film, Hollywood called. If you wanted publishing, theater, fashion or television, another city usually seemed to hold the infrastructure.

Oklahoma became extraordinarily good at exporting creative people.

That story is changing. The state’s film and television infrastructure has expanded significantly in recent years, creating more opportunities for productions and creative workers to make projects here.

That does not mean Oklahoma has suddenly become Los Angeles, nor should it try to. The more interesting possibility is that Oklahoma can become more fully itself: a place where filmmakers, musicians, writers, designers and artists can leave when they need to, return when they want to, collaborate across borders and increasingly make meaningful work without assuming success requires permanently abandoning home.

As Mitchell put it when speaking to Oklahoma artists:

“You don’t have to be somewhere to do your art or your craft.” — Mike Mitchell, OKPOP Oral History

That sentence would have sounded almost impossible in some creative industries a generation ago. Today, it sounds increasingly like a challenge.

The Crossroads Is Still Open

This is why OKPOP begins with the idea of a Crossroads of Creativity. It is not simply a catchy name for a gallery. It is a way of understanding the state.

Oklahoma has been shaped by people arriving and people leaving. By Native nations maintaining distinct cultures through enormous disruption. By Black communities building towns and musical networks. By oil booms building theaters and museums. By immigrants bringing traditions from around the world. By radio towers carrying a fiddle across hundreds of miles. By migrants carrying songs west, writers carrying Oklahoma onto Broadway and musicians carrying Tulsa into California studios. By children encountering art in classrooms, and by families telling stories on front porches.

This is not a neat history. Crossroads rarely are. People arrive from different directions. They bring different histories. They disagree. They exchange. They influence. They leave. Sometimes they come back.

And occasionally, right there in the middle, something appears that could not have existed anywhere else.

That may be the real story of Oklahoma creativity. Not that every great artist came from here. Not that Oklahoma somehow owns the culture its people helped create. And certainly not that hardship automatically produces great art.

The more interesting idea is that place creates possibilities. Oklahoma has repeatedly brought different people, traditions, landscapes and histories into proximity. Its creatives have turned those circumstances into songs, poems, movies, jokes, novels, television, dance, visual art and entirely new sounds.

Some traveled by highway. Some traveled by radio wave. Some traveled on records and film reels. Today they travel instantly across screens. But the movement continues, and so does the creating.

For more than a century, popular culture has carried pieces of Oklahoma into the world. Now the road leads the other direction, too. New stories are arriving. New voices are emerging. New people are making things in bedrooms, studios, classrooms, garages, soundstages, tribal communities, small towns and city neighborhoods all across the state.

The crossroads is not a chapter of Oklahoma history that ended. We are still standing in it.

And somewhere in Oklahoma right now, somebody is making the next thing that will leave here and travel farther than they can imagine.

That is the Crossroads of Creativity.

That is Oklahoma.

Sources

OKPOP Oral History interviews with Garth Brooks, Michael Wallis, Joy Harjo, Daniel Nayeri, Mike Mitchell and Rhys Martin.

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture (Oklahoma Historical Society): American Indian Removal / Indian Territory; American Indian Music; All-Black Towns; Jazz; Western Swing; Bob Wills; Cyrus Avery; Oklahoma Migration (“Okies”); Dust Bowl; Country Music; Will Rogers; Oklahoma!; J.J. Cale; Leon Russell; Jesse Ed Davis.