Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads

Driving through the panhandle of Oklahoma—a land so flat and seemingly empty that its name of No Man’s Land drifts through your thoughts as you look at the endless horizon—it’s still easy to imagine the blight of the Dust Bowl. The dust has now long ago settled in Oklahoma, and the Woody Guthrie Center opened in 2013 in Tulsa, encouraging one of his biggest fans, Bob Dylan, to establish his own archives on the same block. Yet Guthrie’s writings about the experience of being a migrant, the ruin of the land from our disregard for its care, and the struggle to support yourself under a government that undermines your survival, all remain radically relevant today.

Considering the influence of Dust Bowl Ballads on what an album can be in terms of its storytelling and activism, this book explores the album in its contemporary context. It draws on the author’s first-hand visits to sites related to Guthrie and this album and includes interviews with people who have been creatively engaging with the legacy of this album, such as a graphic novelist who turned his Dust Bowl Ballads into a visual voyage about his life. While many people are familiar with his anthemic “This Land Is Your Land,” there is much more to explore in Guthrie’s musical impact, with the Dust Bowl Ballads album—his first major commercial release—being a touchpoint for his legacy.