Track Listing

1. The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)
2. Talking Dust Bowl Blues
3. Pretty Boy Floyd
4. Dusty Old Dust (So Long It's Been Good To Know Yuh)
5. Dust Bowl Blues
6. Blowin' Down The Road (I Ain't Gonna To Be Treated This Way)
7. Tom Joad (Part 1)
8. Tom Joad (Part 2)
9. Do Re Mi
10. Dust Bowl Refugee
11. I Ain't Got No Home
12. Vigilante Man
13. Dust Can't Kill Me
14. Dust Pneumonia Blues
15. Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues (alternate take)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6540 in Music
• Released on: 2000-07-11
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds

From Amazon.com
Few records hit this hard. Guthrie's theme is the Great Depression's devastation, as visited on the land and people of America's heartland. Guthrie raises the talking blues form to a new level of realism and poetry, and he charges some of his strongest story songs ("Tom Joad" and "Pretty Boy Floyd") with a vividness songwriters like Springsteen and Dylan have chased ever since. Need to decide on one Guthrie album? This is it. --Roy Francis Kasten

Amazon.com essential recording
"If you'll gather 'round me children, a story I will tell," sings Woody Guthrie in "Pretty Boy Floyd." Children of all ages have never stopped gathering 'round Woody Guthrie since he recorded these songs in the spring of 1940, and that most-famous line tells us a lot about his approach: his songs are for all people, simple and direct enough to be understood by young ones, irresistibly catchy, yet devilishly clever and cutting. His ability to boil down complex emotions and issues to their very core has rarely been matched. "So long it's been good to know yuh," he sings in "Dusty Old Dust," and its childlike sing-along quality only serves to reinforce his very serious points. Across these 14 songs, Guthrie recounts and relives his experience as an Okie forced from his home by the Depression and drought of the 1930s, chronicling the arduous journey in brilliant, sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying detail. The characters that inhabit his stories are sincere, sympathetic, and brutally alive. Originally released in 1940 on two albums, and again in 1964 for the benefit of salivating folk revivalists, Dust Bowl Ballads returns once again in 2000 freshly remastered, full of new photos and boasting one alternate take. If there is one album of modern American folk music that deserves to be reissued for the benefit of each generation, it is this collection. In terms of the singer-songwriter concept, it is truly the river's source; in historical terms, it's to the New Deal what the Declaration of Independence is to the American Revolution. --Marc Greilsamer

Album Description
Recorded in 1940, and later reissued by Folkways Recordings in 1950, Guthrie's first album chronicles the American Dust Bowl through his prosaic style of talking blues. Using only guitar and vocals, the album follows the exodus of Midwesterners headed for California and mirrors both Guthrie's own life and John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Along the way, characters are forced into theft, murder, and unbearable hardship against a biblical backdrop of the American West. Hugely influential, Dust Bowl Ballads has been revered by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. In Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, Steinbeck wrote of Guthrie: "Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spir