Guthrie and The Dust Bowl Ballads

The story of the migrant people, the displaced farmers of the great plains who were dusted out or tractored out is preserved in a set of texts--literary, photographic, artistic, musical--which interact. We've already seen how Steinbeck's work was informed by a photographer (Bristol). Benton's illustrations combined with The Grapes of Wrath created a hybrid text, incorporating two independently authentic yet intertwined works of art. Later we'll see a non-fiction writer (Agee) and a photographer (Evans) produce in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In this post, I'd like to expand on the contributions of Woody Guthrie, an songwriter whose musical texts add another dimension to the richness of this narrative, and how he too interacts with the texts we've seen.

In class, we listened to the song "Tom Joad," a ballad which re-tells the Steinbeck story with a slant toward the political angle. However, like Thomas Hart Benton, Guthrie's contribution to the corpus of texts surrounding the Dust Bowl extends beyond this one instance directly related to The Grapes of Wrath. In fact, by 1940, Guthrie had written so many songs about this story that he released an entire album titled "Dust Bowl Ballads." The video below is a recording of "Dust Bowl Refugee" one of the tracks from that album:

Lyrics

This song tells the same story as The Grapes of Wrath, except from the perspective of a "dust bowl refugee." In the interview at the end of the video, Guthrie explains that he felt this moniker did not do justice to the dignity or the hardship the migrants went through. Its function is similar to that of the label "Okies" in The Grapes of Wrath.

I'd also like to mention that Guthrie did more than just write songs. He was a graphomaniac and among his many writings is his autobiography Bound for Glory, which tells his story of growing up in Oklahoma and his bumming and wandering across the country. (Jessica has very nice close reading comparison of the Jungles from this book and the Hoovervilles of The Grapes of Wrath.) Guthrie also did some drawings--the pen and ink images in the beginning of the video are some of his illustrations of the "whirlwinds," a motif of Bound for Glory which is a symbol of the boom and bust of oil towns that he lived in as a child as well as the mental state of his mother, who suffered from Huntington's disease. The motif arises too in "Dust Bowl Refugee":

"Yes, we wander and we work

In your crops and in your fruit,
Like the whirlwinds on the desert
That's the dust bowl refugees."

This wind appears over an over again with Guthrie: the dust storms seem to haunt him. He often uses that metaphor for his own wanderings across the country. (This motif by the way was picked up by Bob Dylan in "Blowin' in the Wind," another song with a social conscience).

Many of Guthrie's songs resonate with other themes of The Grapes of Wrath. He makes a direct allusion to "Preacher Casy" in "Vigilante Man," and the constant presence of the deputies in the later chapters of the novel is akin to the repetition in that song of the lyric "Have you seen that vigilante man? I've heard his name all over this land." The major theme of The Grapes of Wrath comes across in "Do-re-mi." In this song, he warns migrants of the disappointment to expect upon arriving in the Promised Land:

"California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;

But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi."

Guthrie's work is one more piece of this network of texts which arose in response to the environmental calamity of the Dust Bowl. His songs enter into a conversation with The Grapes of Wrath, but they are different in their point of view. They express the anguish of the migrants as told in first person, in the voice of someone who lived with them, who bummed all over the country singing songs for working folks.

(You can find all the tracks and lyrics for "Dust Bowl Ballads here

Years Beneath the Surface

The depth and emotion John Steinbeck engraves in his interchapters of The Grapes of Wrath is stunning. There is little need for dialogue in these chapters to really flesh out a wide scale of human emotion and vivid imagery. Instead of a standard narration, Steinbeck opts for digging below the surface to give his readers insight to meaning behind what goes on in his story.

Chapter nine in particular secured my fascination. As the family attempts to sell its household belongings, Steinbeck uses this chapter to give us a sense of the impact the move is having on the characters. His narration "recalls" the memories that are tied with each item for sale, and how painful the sales are when they are cut way below what the owner values of them. It is not just plow they are selling; it's a plow that farmed the land their family was born on, grew up on, and lived on for generations. When the buyer walks away with the plow for a deal close to robbery, he takes with him some bitterness of the soul that remains with it (Steinbeck, 86).

The quote about the two horses and the wagon being sold as a package is my favorite of the chapter, as it really transports one into the world of the Dust Bowl, with an image as vivid as if it was one of our own memories. "You're buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek," (Steinbeck, 87). How often have I myself felt like a part of myself was leaving with things I gave away, or sold at a yard sale? Perhaps parts of our souls really do remain in those former possessions.

Steinbeck's descriptions create a whole new depth to his story and characters. Instead of just reading about their personalities and adventure, we are treated to an inside look to the roots of the old American families' sense of belonging and value, giving us a deeper understanding of their pride.