Dust Bowl Ballads [Buddha]

Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads stands as one of the great early concept albums, loosely tracing the story laid out in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. In fact, Tom Joad is essentially the plot of the book turned into song.

The story opens, as The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster) tells it, “On the fourteenth day of April of 1935,” when a huge dust storm tears through the Great Plains and changes the land completely. Not long after, farming families pack up and head west, drawn by promises of plentiful work picking fruit in California’s fertile valleys.

The journey itself gets a wry treatment in Talking Dust Bowl Blues, but the arrival is anything but hopeful. Once there, the Okies find that California is far less welcoming if you haven’t brought some “do[ough] re mi.” Across the album, Guthrie moves back and forth through this story, sometimes zeroing in on the violence of the dust storm, sometimes on the people making life harder, especially deputy sheriffs and vigilantes.

On Pretty Boy Floyd, he takes a slight detour, recasting the outlaw as a misunderstood Robin Hood figure. Throughout the record, Guthrie balances dry humour with real defiance. In 1940, listeners would also have picked up on the pointed contrast with Jimmie Rodgers, whose style is echoed and gently mocked in Dust Pneumonia Blues.

Heard now, these songs also carry the weight of everything that followed in their wake, especially the folk music of Bob Dylan. However you come to it, this is powerful material, delivered with a directness that still lands. It was devastatingly effective on release, and it helped shape the folk music that came after.