Talking Dust Bowl Blues, song lyrics

Song: Talking Dust Bowl Blues
Lyrics: Woody Guthrie

Music: to the tune of "The Talking Blues"
Year: 1940 or before
Genre:
Country: USA

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.
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
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 engine 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.
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
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.

Notes:

1 - Woody Guthrie biography.

2 - The recording of it was 21 March 1940, but it was probably written a few years before.

3 - The 1930's Dust Bowl from Trey Dunn, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA

4 - More on the Dust Bowl from the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.