Talking Dust Bowl Blues

Talking Dust Bowl Blues - Woody Guthrie

Back in Nineteen Twenty-Seven

I had a little farm and I called that heaven

Well the prices 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 raised a family

Rain quit and the wind got high

And the black ol' dust storm filled the sky

And I swapped my farm for a Ford machine

And I poured it full of this gas-i-line --

And I started rockin' an' a-rollin

Over the mountains, out towards the old Peach Bowl

Way up yonder on a mountain road

I had a hot motor and a heavy load

I's a-goin' pretty fast, there wasn't even stoppin

A-bouncin' up and down, like popcorn poppin' --

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

An' I give that rollin' Ford a shove

An' I's a-gonna coast as far as I could --

Commence coastin' pickin' up speed

Was a hairpin turn I didn't make it

Man alive I'm a-tellin' you

The fiddles and the guitars really flew

That Ford took off like a flying squirrel

An' it flew halfway around the world --

Scattered wives and childrens

All over the side of that mountain

We got out to the West Coast broke

So dad-gum hungry I thought I'd croak“

An' I bummed up a spud or two

An' 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