Woody Guthrie - Dust Bowl Ballads

The Album Concept Hour

We're 194 episodes into this show and as we draw closer to the 200th, we thought we'd get to the ACTUAL first concept album (by most accounts): Woody Guthrie's 1940 song collection called Dust Bowl Ballads. This collection came out in 2-three disc 78 rpm records with one song per side. With autobiographical elements as well as story elements of John Steinbeck's 1939 epic "Grapes of Wrath", this album tells us the tragedy of the Dust Bowl, the forcing of 1000s of families off their farm land, the horrible working conditions of the migrants seeking better life in the "Peach Bowl" of California, and the opposition they found in corrupt business and police-men and their counterparts in vigilantes. Although this came out in 1940, it reflects on a lot of worker's rights issues that we are still facing trying to get fair wages today.

Grapes of Wrath (1940) on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/the-grapes-of-wrath-1940

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