Roll ON Columbia

"At the time Steinbeck was speaking for the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, Woody, the dusty-headed folk-poet, was singing for them over a one-horse radio station in Los Angeles. He always claimed that he learned to play the guitar while he was broadcasting. His okie fans would write him encouraging letters- "keep it up Woody; you almost made a D chord this morning!"
When I met him in New York in 1939, however, he had mastered the Carter family style, and could convulse an audience with his delayed-action, Will Rogers humor. Woody made a great success broadcasting and recording his songs; but he felt uncomfortable about eating well and sleeping soft, when his people were still "wanderin around over the West like a herd of loco-ed buffaloes, and one day he blew out of New York without saying good bye to the phoney big shot producers, and took to the highway again with his guitar.

later in the Northwest: .... The ballads poured out of woody's typewriter with the fresh flow of the Columbia River he had come to love. 26 ballads were composed and recorded in 26 days. Soon over the radio and through public address systems the people in the Bonneville area were listening to a voice they could believe in- a rural voice, harsh, ironical, humorous, truthful, with the heart beat of the southwestern guitar pulsing behind it..........
The minstrel still has a place amongst us. Whether he sings for the King or the US government is not the question, if his songs, like Woody's, are honest an composed in traditional modes. Woody never tried to be original, in the sense of the sophisticated songwriter. Like all folk poets, he uses familiar tunes, re works old songs, adding new lines and phrases out of the folk-say of the situation that demands the new song. He feels that his function is to sum up and crystallize popular sentiment, to act as the voice of the common man. Although his songs are conversational in tone, they have a truth, an authenticity, and a punch which no other poet of this age can match. " (alan lomax book)