Woody guthrie stories

"The American taste for darn fool ditties and for crazy, surrealist, and rather cynical humor, culminates in the talking blues genre. Such songs began to appear in hillbilly recordings in the 20's and 30's, and it was from them that Woody Guthrie took his inspiration. The present early text shows that the talking blues is, ultimately of Negro derivation. Most of the stanzas come from the Po' Mourner set, the barber shop quartet song in which the leader intones humorous verses against a background of rhythmic chords. Speaking in rhythm over a sung accompaniment is a common device among Negro preachers and blues singers (Lead Belly for instance) and some early records exist of Negroes "talking" a story over, or to, their guitars. The talking blues, however, with its delayed climax and its double or triple cracker on the end of the jokes, is a modern, white folk creation, put to the purposes of acid social comment by Woody Guthrie. (from Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America)

Woody writes: I was born in Western Oklahoma and drug up in the Texas panhandle. That's where the wheat grows, where the oil flows, where the dust blows, and the farmer owes= where you hunt for wood, and dig for water- where you can look farther and see less- where there's more weather and less climate, more crops and less groceries than any other dadburned place in the universe.
Then the dust storms come. Dust was so thick you sometimes found yourself running your tractor and plows upside down. The buzzards had to wear goggles and fly backwards. You could easily lose your wife and wake up hugging your mother in law. Sometimes the dust would settle, but your debts wouldn't.
I decided it would be better in California, so I kissed my family goodbye and swung int a Sante Fe cattle car and whistled down the line. For the last few years I've been a rambling man. For 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 calibers, 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 over the states of California and Arizona 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. " (Also from Alan Lomax)