A family on a horse-drawn cart in South-East Missouri: ‘I say “A rollin’ stone gathers no moss”. He says “A settin’ hen never gets fat”. I say to him “Better stay here where people know us. We’d have to sell our team and maybe we’d be left flatfooted”.’ A family from Paris, Arkansas, on the road near Webber Falls, Oklahoma: ‘We’re bound for Kingfisher, Oklahoma, to work in the wheat, and Lubbock, Texas, to work in the cotton. We’re trying not to, but we’ll be in California yet.’
A farmer in Oklahoma: ‘They’re goin’ in every direction and they don’t know where they’re goin’.’ A family in a car sunk on its springs under the load at Muskogee, Oklahoma: ‘We started from Joplin, Missouri, with five dollars. We’re bound for California if we can make it in time for grape picking.’ On US 54 in New Mexico: ‘They keep the road hot a-goin’ and a-comin’. They’ve got roamin’ in their head.’
Five displaced tenant farmers in North Texas: ‘Where we gonna go?’ ‘How we gonna get there?’ ‘What we gonna do?’ ‘Who we gonna fight?’ ‘If we fight, what we gotta whip?’ A tractored-out farmer in Texas Plains: ‘Was waiting to see what would be the outcome of my hunt for a place, and the outlook right now is that I’ll move to town and sell my team, tools and cows. I’ve hunted from Childress, Texas, to Haskell, Texas, a distance of 200 miles, and the answer is the same. I can stay off the relief until the first of the year. After that I don’t know. I’ve got to make a move, but I don’t know where to.’ A refugee, in California, from Cimarron County: ‘No, I didn’t sell out back there, I give out.’
32 Who we gonna fight?
In what way were we trapped? where, our mistake? what,
how, when, what way, might all these things have been
different, if only we had done otherwise? If only we might
have known… How did we get caught?
James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
‘Intensive, large-scale and highly seasonal agriculture have created in California the largest wage-earning class, proportionately, of any important agricultural state,’ writes Taylor. They have produced a large, landless and mobile proletariat… Like fresh sores which open by over-irritation of the skin and close under the growth of protective cover, dust bowls form and heal.
‘The winds churned the soil, leaving vast stretches of farms blown and hummocked like deserts or the margins of beaches. They loosened the hold of settlers on the land, and like particles of dust drove them rolling down ribbons of highway.’
The particles of dust said in various places: ‘We just make enough for beans, and when we have to buy gas it comes out of the beans.’ ‘What bothers us travellin’ people most is we can’t get no place to stay still.’ ‘People got to stop somewhere. Even a bird has got a nest.’
The following year a book entitled Land of the Free was published. It was again a frieze of photographs of the unknown, unbelievable American povertyscape of the Thirties, photographs taken mostly for the Resettlement Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Soil Conservation Administration. The commentary was in free verse by Archibald Macleish:
… All you needed for freedom was being American
All you needed for freedom was grit in your craw
And the gall to get out on a limb and crow before sunup
… There was always some place else a man could head for
… We looked West from a rise and we saw forever
Now that the land’s behind us we get wondering
You need your heelhold on a country steady
You need a continent against your feet
… Blown out on the wheat
Tractored off the cotton in the Brazos
Sawed out in the timber on the Lakes
Washed out on the grassland in Kentucky
Shot-gunned off in Arkansas
… We’ve got the road to go by where it takes us
… We’ve got the cotton choppers’ road from Corpus Christie
North over Texas; West over Arizona
Over the mesas; over the mile-high mountains
Over the waterless country; on West
We’ve got the pea-pickers’ road out of California
North into Oregon; back into Arizona
East to Colorado for the melons
North to Billings for the beet crop… back again…
We’ve got the fruit tramps’ road from Florida northward
Tangipahoa Parish Louisiana
North to Judsonia, Arkansas: east to Paducah
North to Vermilion, Illinois … into Michigan
… We’ve got the road to go by where it takes us
We’ve got the narrow acre of the road
To go by when the land’s gone
… Men don’t talk much standing by the roadside
We wonder whether the dream of American liberty
Was two hundred years of pine and hardwood
And three generations of the grass
And the generations are up: the years over… We wonder
We don’t know
We’re asking.
33 Dust can’t kill me
Los Angeles wants no duds, loafers and paupers; people
who have no means and trust to luck, cheap politicians,
failures, bummers, scrubs, impecunious clerks, bookkeepers,
lawyers, doctors. We need workers! Hustlers! Men of
brains, brawn and guts! Men who have a little capital and
a good deal of energy - first-class men.
Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, 1886
Some of the answers were given by a tramp guitarist and radical whose anger at what he had seen on the road and in the Federal Work Camps went into documentary songs about human fortitude and hard times of the American kind. They were not politically partisan but more in the tradition of the Western come-all-ye autobiographical ballads and the Southern dam’-fool ditties, which recounted real happenings to real people - gun-fights, hangings, train wrecks, strikes and elections, and prodigious feats of labour, which were oral newspapers about events and luminaries in the turbulent, mysteriously wayward working class world of America.
Woody Guthrie was himself an Oklahoman, from Okemeh, an early oil boom town. He sold newspapers, jig-danced on the sidewalk for pennies, then at thirteen hit the road South to Houston, Galveston and the Gulf, and back, hoeing figs, weeding orchards, gathering grapes, hauling timber, helping cement men and well-drillers.
He carried a harmonica and gigged in barber shops and pool halls, around truckstops and shoe shine stands. During a store job in Pampa he learned the guitar and began entertaining at ranch and town dances, at rodeos, fairs, carnivals and ‘bust-down parties’. He hustled his way to California as a sign painter, playing and painting his way along the highway, and in Los Angeles got on to a radio country programme, which he used as the outlet for propaganda union songs he had begun writing, about cotton strikers, canning house workers and dispossessed dirt farmers.
Although he sang around the wayside jungles and fruit pickers’ camps, it was oddly enough after seeing the film of The Grapes of Wrath in New York that he wrote his Dust Bowl Ballads, for Guthrie had been ahead of the mainstream of tincan tourists. All the same he had mingled with plenty who had taken that route.
He told Lomax: ‘For the last few years I’ve been a rambling man. From Oklahoma to California and back, by freight train and thumb - I’ve been stranded and disbanded, busted and disgusted with people of all sorts, shapes, sizes and calibres - folks that wandered all over the country looking for work, down and outers, and hungry half the time.
‘I slept with their feet in my face and my feet in theirs, with Okies and Arkies that were rambling like a herd of lost buffalo with the hot hoof and empty mouth disease. Pretty soon I found out I had relatives under every railroad bridge between Oklahoma and California.
‘Walking down the big road, no money, no job, no home, no nothing, nights I slept in jails, and
the cells were piled high with young boys, strong men and old men. They talked and they sung and they told the story of their lives - how it used to be, how it got to be, how the home went to pieces, how the young wife died or left, how Dad tried to kill himself, how the banks sent out tractors and tractored down the houses. So somehow I picked up an old rusty guitar and started to picking and playing the songs I heard and making up new ones about what folks said.’
In the West, he wrote in his book Bound for Glory, he met ‘the hard-rock miners, old prospectors, desert rats and whole swarms of hitch-hikers, migratory workers - squatted with their little piles of belongings in the shade of the big signboards, out across the flat, hard-crust, graveling desert. Kids chasing around in the blistering sun. Ladies cooking scrappy meals in sooty buckets, scouring the plates clean with sand. All waiting for some kind of a chance to get across the California line.
‘Yes, guess I’m what you’d call a migrant worker … I ain’t nothing much but a guy walking along … Thumbing it. Hitching it. Walking it and talking it … From Barstow to San Ber-nadino to Los Angeles to everywhere, I set my hat on the back of my head and strolled from town to town with my guitar slung over my shoulder.
‘I sung along a lot of boweries, back streets and skid rows. I sung on Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City, and Community Camp and Hooversville, on the flea-bit rim of the garbage dump; in the city jail in Denver, in Raton and Dodge City. I sung long tales and ballads for the railroad gangs on the Texas plains, the road workers along the border.
‘In Portland I sung for a lot of ship scalers, inland boatmen, and timber workers; I hit Chicago on a wild cattle train from Minneapolis and sung in a dozen saloons across the street from the big packing-houses, with the Swedes, the Slavs, Russians, Norwegians, Irish, Negroes.
‘It looked like everybody leaned on everybody’s shoulder, and the songs and tunes didn’t have any race or colour much, because what’s right for a man anywhere is right for you wherever you are … I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it’s run you down and rolled you over, no matter what colour, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work.’
In the late Thirties Guthrie was in New York meeting with formulating politically-conscious ‘progressive’ song writers and folk groups. He was by then deeply involved in union campaigns. He sank at IWO lodges,’ at Hooversvilles and camptowns of the unemployed through the South into Oklahoma, in union halls and in factory workers’ clubs, and on New York radio shows and for Moe Asch’s record company. He composed and sang - or ‘talked’, for he perfected the mountain idiom of the ‘talking blues’, which isn’t really the blues at all - about the building of the huge New Deal public utility project, the Grand Coulee Dam of the Bon-nerville Power Administration, about anti-fascism, about union-busting vigilantes with tear gas and blackjacks, about strikes and lockouts, about the homeless and unorganized and destitute, and about their loss of faith in what has been called ‘story-book democracy’.
Guthrie’s voice, or rather his simplism, worked better in song than in prose. In print his folk-say steams a bit discomfortingly with a theatrical ordinariness, although that has in itself an honourable lineage from the ring-tailed roarer, the half slapstick, half romantic teller of tall tales and the epic brag, who both made and was made by the frontier myth.
Guthrie’s proselytizing pilgrimage through the Northern American continent is, when set down on the page, self-regardingly Homeric. Yet he has conveyed uniquely well the bravura and the wonderment and the vehemence and the profligacy, both of waste and muscle, which have all collided together in every crossing of this immense land. He has grasped the ‘whole big flood of all these kinds of new wide open, free airish, sky clear feelings’ in Oregon and the Pacific North-West mountain towns, and where ‘the neon signs splutter and crackle’ on to the ‘hock-shop windows, the coffee joints, slippery stool dives, hash counters’ of the city skid rows.
It is in his songs that Guthrie is most bony and poetical, the voice of a hard-travellin’ minstrel who had relevant statements to make on behalf of the common man off the rails. ‘Sharecropper before I hit th’ road,’ he comments in his adaptation of the hymn Heaven Will Be My Home, I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore. ‘I got th’ share. Boss got th’ crop. You think they’s lots of us out loose on th’ roads. River’s a-risin’ an’ it’s gonna be more,’ and then he sings:
I ain’t got no home
I’m just a ramblin’ round
I’m just a wanderin’ workin’ man
I go from town to town
Police make it hard where I may go
And I ain’t got no home in this world any more.
Tenaciously Guthrie kept with strict literalness to the ‘untrained’ acumen of the broadsheet commentator whose like is still to be found in both church and sugar shack in the South and West, the narrow-eyed, alert tension behind the lazy expression, which is a ubiquitous American manner, from the cow-puncher to the truck driver, from the jazz musician to the soda jerk. In all of Guthrie’s songs, conversational, throw-away, poker-faced, he kept to the hillbilly delayed action, the succinct slyness, but his tongue was that of a political evangelist. He was a poet of the sort who used to earn the pioneer audience plaudit: True as steel - that’s exactly like it happened.’
Long before folk song became the best-selling commodity it did in the 1960s, before it had a paying audience and before it became essential armament for the Civil Rights movement and the peace marchers, Guthrie was delivering social messages in his topical ‘radio ballads’ to the people they were about, which included himself.
We come with the dust and we go with the wind, was a line in his Pastures of Plenty, about the migrant workers who crop the Californian peach trees, pick the hops in Oregon and dig up the beets and gather the wine grapes:
It’s a mighty hard road that my poor hands has hoed And my poor feet has travelled a hot dusty road.
He had this to say about the unemployed’s improvised igloos which grew like tumours on every Depression city:
Ramblin’, gamblin’, rickety shacks
That’s Hooversville
Rusty tin an’ raggedy sacks
Makes Hooversville.
On the skeeter bit end of the garbage dump
Thirty million people slump
Down where the big rats run ‘n’ jump
In Hooversville.
This was Guthrie’s requiem for generations of labouring men who built tracks, roads and industry across the United States:
I hammered in the water, hammered in the rock
Hammered on the railroad, hammered on the dock
Hammered in the mill, hammered in the mine
I been in jail about a thousand times.
There was again the language and hand-lines of the card-carrying oilfield hand in Boomtown Bill:
I held down jobs of roustabout, roughneck, and driller too,
Coke knocker, gauger, fireman and bucked the casing crew,
Fought fires with Happy Owell, a man you all know well,
I worked the cross and cracking still, my name is Boomtown Bill.
I polished bits in Texas dust from the ocean to the plains,
Worked every field in forty-eight states and half way back again,
Six million CIO workers just naturally can’t be wrong,
We’ll work to win the union way and I hope it don’t take long.
Passion is most revealed in his Dust Bowl Ballads, perhaps because these were his own people and their journey had been his. His Tom Joad, written on a typewriter in a New York apartment the night after seeing The Grapes of Wrath, is the novel’s plot, narrative, background and densely worked overtones condensed into seventeen verses with meticulous clarity. ‘The people back in Oklahoma haven’t got two bucks to buy the book, or even thirty-five cents to s
ee the movie,’ he said, ‘but the song will get back to them.’
His Dust Can’t Kill Me again has the heroic plainness: a tenant farmer’s catalogue of the disasters which have belaboured him. The pawnshop has got his furniture, ‘but it can’t get me’; the tractor has run his home down, ‘but it can’t run me down’; the dust storm has blown his barn down, ‘but it can’t blow me down’; the landlord has got his homestead, ‘but he can’t get me’ and, the final defiant affirmation, the dry spell has killed his crop, his baby, his family - ‘but it can’t kill me’.
What happened to the Great Plains refugees who lived through it? Some - 456,000 between 1930 and 1940 - transferred to Washington and Oregon. This was not drifting but determined resettlement, a re-grouping with their own neighbours, the transplanting of communities. McWilliams found that in Kitsap County, Washington, there were ninety people who had previously lived in or around a South Dakota town of 300. Whenever they could they stuck together.
At first they settled in camps - just the unladenings of their cars, where they could park - which were resented and fought off by the older established. They had little choice of land: ‘shoestring’ valleys in clearings amid brush scrub, in once-forested stump lands of sour soil, in deserted marginal farms. Real estate sharks saw the opportunity for profit and quickly ran up cheap subdivisions of ‘farmettes’, plots for rabbit farms and goat farms, and sold at extortionate hire-purchase rates.
To earn money the Okies and Arkies invaded the seasonal market of the North-West with its fever peaks of activity when 35,000 hands were needed in the hop fields and apple and cherry orchards, after which State Highway patrolmen saw to it that the migrants vacated the Yakima Valley.
In California the half-million drought refugees who slid in under the bar, and who pussyfooted in after the bums’ blockade was abandoned, found land all appropriated and steady jobs as rare as a spare acre. They, even more imperatively than their neighbours who went North, were sucked into the straggling hordes servicing the brimming productive bowls of the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys. From their squatter shacktowns around Salinas (there had grown a resident camp population in California of 150,000) they went off at the bidding of fruit and vegetable growers when the times of heavy labour need came round.
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