Lyrics Talking Dust Bowl Blues (Alternate Version) - Woody Guthrie

Back in nineteen twenty-seven
I had a little farm and I called that heaven
When the price's up and the rain come down
And I hauled the crops all into town
I got the money, bought clothes and groceries
Fed the kids and raised a family
The rain, it quit and the wind got high
And the black, old 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 then started rockin' and rollin'
Over the mountains and deserts and stuff like that to California
Way up yonder, on a mountain road
A hot motor and a heavy load
I was goin' purty fast, I wasn't even stoppin'
A-bouncin' up and down, like popcorn poppin'
Had a breakdown, some kind of a nervous bustdown of some kind
There was a feller there, mechanic feller, said it was engine trouble
Way up yonder, on a mountain curve
I was way up yonder, in a piney wood
I gave that rollin' Ford a shove
And I was gonna coast as far as I could
Commence rollin', pickin' up speed
It was a hairpin turn an' 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 flyin' squirrel
And 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 croke
And I bummed up a spud or two
And my wife fixed up a tater stew
And we fed kids [?] of it
The [?] bunch of five [?] runnin' around
That stew is a-thin
You could read a magazine right through it
Always have thought and always had figured
That if it'd been just little bit thinner
Some of these here politicians could've seen through it