Talking Dust Bowl Blues

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. 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 en-gine 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. 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.