Woody Guthrie: "Talking Dustbowl Blues"

Back in Nineteen Twenty-Seven,
I had a little farm and I called that heaven.
The price was up and the rain come down,
And I hauled my crops all into town--
I got the money, bought clothes and groceries,
Fed the kids, and took it easy.

Rain quit and the wind got high,
And a black old dust storm filled the sky.
I swapped my farm for a Ford machine,
And I poured it full of this gas-i-line--
And I started, rocking and a-rolling,
Over the mountains, out towards California.

Way up yonder on a mountain road,
I had a hot motor and a heavy load,
I was going pretty fast, there wasn't even stopping,
A-bouncing up and down, like popcorn popping--
Had a breakdown, sort of a nervous bustdown of some kind,
There was a feller there, a mechanic feller,
Said it was en-gine trouble.

Way up yonder on a mountain curve,
It's way up yonder in the piney wood,
And I give that rolling Ford a shove,
And I was gonna coast as far as I could--
Commence coasting, picking up speed,
Was a hairpin turn, I didn't make it.

Man alive, I'm a-telling you,
The fiddles and the guitars really flew.
That Ford took off like a flying squirrel
And it flew halfway around the world--
Scattered wives and children
All over the side of that mountain.

We got out to the West Coast broke,
So dad-gum hungry I thought I'd croak,
I bummed up a spud or two,
And my wife fixed up a tater stew--
We poured the kids full of it,
Mighty thin stew, though,
You could read a magazine right through it.
Always have figured
That if it'd been just a little bit thinner,
Some of these here politicians
Coulda seen through it.

--Woody Guthrie (1912--1967)