Chapter 3 - CALIFORNIA:

IN 1937, LIKE THOUSANDS OF OTHERS, Woody went to California; Mary and the girls were to remain with the family in Pampa until he could afford to send for them. Woody's California experience shaped the rest of his life. It was out there that he wrote some of his best songs, among them the Dust Bowl Ballads. He became the voice of the Okies and Arkies, traveling up and down the West Coast, singing his songs on their behalf.

Back in Oklahoma, tales of the fruit valleys of California had seemed to promise paradise: jobs, warm weather, no dust.

"All of us would get together," Woody recalled, "in the little old shacks there in the Dust Bowl and we would talk about some place to go where we could get a piece of land or a little farm and get out of that dust and all that dust pneumonia and all that wind up there on the Texas plains. . . . They sat around and talked there for weeks and weeks, hated to give up what they worked there for fifty years and be born and raised and married on-and had their kids on this land.

"They owed thousands of dollars in debts and when they couldn't pay them, well naturally they come down with the mortgage and took their land.

"These people just got up and hit this road with moderately little belongings, things they thought they would need. They didn't have the money for gasoline. "They heard about the land of California where you sleep outdoors all night and work all day in the big fruits and make ixgh money to get by on and live decent on." These hopes and aspirations were embodied in a song titled California Blues:

Going to California and sleeping out every night
'Cause the Oklahoma women just ain't treating you right
And I would rather drink muddy water and sleep in a hollow log
Than to be down in Texas treated like a dirty dog.
Them California waters taste like cherry wine
As the Georgia waters taste like turpentine.

California Blues, especially as recorded by Jimmy Rodgers, "the yodeling brakeman," swept the South and Southwest. The record became more than a best seller-it made converts.

"That record went," said Woody, "through Oklahoma . . . Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Kansas. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of people gang around an electric phonograph and listen to ... that song.

"And they'd punch each other in the ribs with their elbows — 'Boy, there's a place to go. That old boy is singing the truth. Listen to him sing! I'm telling you it makes me want to pick up right now and leave— "California waters taste like cherry wine; sleep out every night." ' "

The California peach and apricot growers, seeking a large and cheap labor supply, circulated handbills throughout the Dust Bowl, promising what they never intended to deliver: "Eight hundred wanted. Come on out! Get the jobs while they're hot!" But there were no 800 jobs when they arrived, and thousands of people traveled thousands of miles in broken-down jalopies only to suffer bitter disappointment. The trek to California was a series of hardships: hunger, exposure to blistering heat and numbing cold, and encounters with police and railroad bulls.

As crowds of down-and-outers, riding freight trains and bumming rides on the highway, arrived in towns along the way, police would line the men up at the railroad station to buy tickets for as far as their money could carry them. It was an ironic situation: nothing to eat and forced to buy tickets to some place they didn't know or want to know! Woody wrote: "It was highly unsanitary to be out of work. In most towns all over the country it is ajailhouse offense to be unemployed and they enforced that when they took a notion. Having money was all that counted. They don't ask you how you got it, just so you got the do-re-mi, that's the main thing." And he sang:

Lots of folks back East, they say,
Leavin' home every day
Beatin' a hot old dusty way
To the California line. 'Cross the desert sands they roll
Gettin' out of the old Dust Bowl,
Think they're a-comin' to a Sugar Bowl,
But here's what they find-
The police at the port of entry say
You're number fourteen thousand for today-Oh!

Chorus
If you ain't got the do-re-mi, Boys
If you ain't got the do-re-mi
You better go back to beautiful Texas,
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden
A paradise to live in or see.
But believe it or not you won't find it's so hot
If you ain't got the do-re-mi!

When Woody got to California, he saw it all:

Hundreds and thousands of families . . . under railroad bridges, ... in beat-up houses made out of tow sacks and old dirty rags and corrugated iron that they got out of dumps . . . and old orange crates-I couldn't believe it. They had a little old spring of water ... to do their wash in, to shave in, wash their teeth in, drink from and even for sewerage disposal. Three or four hundred families trying to get along on a stream of water that wasn't any bigger than the stream of water that comes from your faucet!

But no matter how badly the Dust Bowlers were treated in California, they knew it was worse back home.

We remembered the old tractor . . . covered up by dust, the dust standing up on top of the barn; and looking out across that dead sea of dust. And we said, "No mister, I would rather be in jail here than setting down there on that farm." . . . People from Oklahoma that had worked hard all their lives and split walnut and oak timber, drilled oil wells, picked that cotton, raised crops. When they got to California and heard everybody calling them just the "Dust Bowl Refugees," why, they didn't know exactly what to do about it. They didn't know what the people meant when they called somebody else a "refugee." They walked down the highways, carried their shoes in their hands, and walked across the desert with blisters all over their feet, 2,000 miles, trying to find a job of work.

We had always been taught to believe that these 48 states that is called the United States was absolutely free country and that anybody who took a notion to get up and go anywhere in these 48 states, could, without anybody else asking him a whole bunch of questions or trying to keep him from going where he started out to go.

Well, the native California sons and daughters, I will admit, had a lot to be proud of. They had their ancestors that come in on the old covered wagons and discovered oil, gold and silver, and built California to quite a wonderful empire.

But they hadn't built quite a wonderful enough empire. They needed more and more people to pick their fruit. But they looked down for some reason on the people that come in there from other states to do that kind of work.

In Dust Bowl Refugee Woody tells of the hard life of the migrant workers, wandering from job to job.

I'm a Dust Bowl refugee,
Just a Dust Bowl refugee
From that Dust Bowl to the Peach Bowl.
Now the peach fuzz is killing me.
'Cross the mountains to the sea,
Come the wife and kids and me,
It's a hot old dusty highway
For the Dust Bowl refugees.

Yes we wander and we work
In your crops and in your fruit,
Like the whirlwinds on the desert
That's the Dust Bowl refugees.

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