hewanted a steady income. Having learned the Carter Familyâs old-style country tunes, and with original songs like âRamblinâ Roundâ and âBlowing Down This Old Dusty Roadâ in his repertoire, he was determined to become a folksinger who mattered. In early 1937âthe exact week is unknown, but it was after the snow had thawedâGuthrie packed up his painting supplies, put new strings on his guitar, and bummed a ride in a beer delivery truck to Groom, Texas. Hopping out of the cab and waving good-bye, he started hitching down Highway 66 (what Steinbeck called the âroad of flightâ), where migrants were begging for food in every flyspeck town, to Los Angeles.
There is an almost biblical sense of trials and tribulations in the obstacles Guthrie would confront in California. Like all the other migrants on Highway 66, he always felt starvation banging on his rib cage. From time to time, he pawned his guitar to buy food. Like the photographer Dorothea Lange, he visited farm camps in Californiaâs San Joaquin Valley, stunned to see so many children suffering from malnutrition. But then Guthrieâs big break came when he landed a job as an entertainer on KFVD radio in Los Angeles, singing âold-timeâ traditional songs with his partner Maxine Crissman (âLefty Lou from Mizzouâ). His hillbilly demeanor was affecting, and the local airwaves allowed Guthrie to reach fellow workers in migrant camps with his nostalgic songs about life in Oklahoma and Texas. For a while, he broadcast out of the XELO studio from Villa Acuña in the Mexican state of Coahuila; the stationâspowerful signal went all over the American Midwest and Canada, unimpeded by topography and unfettered by FCC regulations.
Many radio station owners wanted Guthrie to be a smooth cowboy swing crooner like Bob Wills (âMy Adobe Haciendaâ) and Gene Autry (âBack in the Saddle Againâ). Guthrie, however, had developed a different strategy for folksinging that he clung to uncompromisingly. âI hate a song that makes you think youâre not any good,â he explained. âI hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that ⦠songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.â
When Guthrie became a âhobo reporterâ for The Light in 1938, he traveled extensively, reporting on the 1.25 million displaced Americans of the late 1930s. The squalor of the migrant camps angered him. He kept wishing the poor could live in adobe homes. âPeople living hungrier than rats and dirtier than dogs,â Guthrie wrote, âin the land of sun and a valley of night.â Guthrie came to understand that, contrary to myth, these so-called Dust Bowl refugees hadnât been chased out of Texas by dusters; nor had they been made obsolete by large farm tractors. They were victims of banks and landlords who had evicted them simplyfor reasons of greed. These money-grubbers wanted to evict tenant farmers in order to turn a patchwork quilt of little farms into huge cattle conglomerates, and they thereby forced rural folks into poverty. During his travels around California, Guthrie saw migrants living in cardboard boxes, mildewed tents, filthy huts, and orange-crate shanties. Every flimsy structure known to mankind had been built, but adobe homes were nowhere to be found. This rankled Guthrie boundlessly. What would Jesus Christ think of these predatory money changers destroying the family farms of America and forcing good folks to live in wretched lean-tos? âFor every farmer who was dusted out or tractored out,â Guthrie said, âanother ten were