Chapter 2 - TEXAS:

IT WAS A BAD TIME to take to the highways. The country was in the grip of the disastrous Depression of 1929, and anyone traveling the roads looking for work had plenty of company. At seventeen. Woody became part of the army of migrant workers who traveled from job to job during America's worst economic slump. The ranks of the jobless were swelling to a reputed 20 million. In three years, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would be calling for a New Deal for the unemployed and depressed. In the meantime, the United States was a huge disaster area and none felt the pinch harder than the people of Texas and Oklahoma as they saw their savings wiped out by the national money crisis and their land wiped out by the dust storms.

Such was the backdrop of Woody's wanderings, as he made his way first to the Gulf Coast, then back to Okemah, and finally to Pampa, Texas, there to join his father. After recovering from his burns, Charlie Guthrie had remained in Pampa, an oil boom town in the Texas Panhandle, the big wheat belt centering around the city of Amarillo. Now he wrote to offer his son the possibility of a job. Woody left a five-dollar-a- week stint in a filling station and hit the road again. He was to make Texas his home until 1937, working on the fringe of the oil industry, raising a family, and writing his first songs.

Woody always claimed that the Pampa-Amarillo area "where the wheat grows, the oil flows, and the farmer owes" was also where the blackest and thickest storms blew. There one could see dust storms of every "color, flavor, description, fashion, shade, design, and model." The wide, flat prairies of the Panhandle had once looked like an endless sea of wheat; now there was a sea of dust, rippling in the wind, smothering the land beneath it.

"We watched the dust storm come up," said Woody, "like the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children." The sight was so frightening that people congregated in different houses around town, seeking solace in each other's company. Men, women, and children would crowd together, hardly able to see each other's faces in the sudden darkness. Strong electric light bulbs, hanging in the middle of a room, seemed to give off about as much light as a glowing cigarette end.

The sun was blotted out at noon and religious people didn't have to go far for analogies:

"Well, boys, girls, friends and relatives, this is the end. This is the end of the world. People ain't been living right. The human race ain't been treating each other right. They have been robbin' each other and shooting around. And the fellow that made this world. He sent us this dust storm."

Now it was time to go, time to cross the river to Death and time to say goodbye to each other.

"Well, so long, it's been good to know you."

It was a Pampa storm that inspired one of Woody's most famous songs. This particular dust storm-one of the worst ever to hit Texas-blew into Pampa on April 14, 1935. It seemed the omen of Doom and it led Woody to sum up the despair of those times.

So long, it's been good to know you
So long, it's been good to know you
So long, it's been good to know you
This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home,
I've got to be driftin' along.

I've sung this song but I'll sing it again
Of the place that I lived on the wild, windy plains
In the month called April, the County called Gray
And here's what all of the people there say:
So long, etc.

The telephone rang and it jumped off the wall
That was the preacher a-making his call
He said "Kind friend, this may be the end,
And I've got a cut price on salvation of sin."

The churches was jammed, the churches was packed,
That dusty old dusty storm blowed so black
The preacher could not read a word of his text,
He folded his specs and he took up collection, said:

So long, it's been good to know you, etc. . . .

Pampa in the Depression was hardly more than a scattering of little run-down shacks built of rotten lumber, box crates, and flattened oil barrels. They were temporary shelters, since most of the workers stayed only long enough to install the machinery and insure the steady flow of oil. By the time Woody moved to Pampa the main part of the boom had gone. Every once in a while a new gusher would open and the town would revive for a time. Once the oil wells were in-the holes drilled down fifteen thousand feet, the valves capping the high pressure gushers, and the oil flowing steadily-there was little for the oil workers to do. They would move out of town as broke and down and out as the first day they came into the camp.

The laborers who came to the oil fields were mostly country people. There was no more work to do on the farm, so they came looking for the high wages and the many jobs they had heard about. They were proud people, hard workers, no matter how exhausting the toil. And they rode hundreds of miles down the highway to the oil camps.

Charlie Guthrie had a job managing a row of buildings, a honeycomb of dives and dens, rickety fire traps. Woody was the handyman. He cleaned rooms, collected the-rents, was chambermaid and "broom waltzer," learned all the goings-on, how the workers got worked, and the crooks got outsmarted. "The whiskey line, the dope ring, flop joints, the hardest workers in the field, best fighters, and the cheapest laundries-I saw the whole works," he wrote later on.

In the rooming houses throughout the boom town area, the walls were so thin you could hear everything from a whisper to a shout, the creak of a bedspring, the thump of a chair being moved from one part of a room to the other. The oil workers called the rhythm of the bedspring creak "the rusty spring blues." Woody claimed that after a minute of listening he could guess the weight of the roomer to within three pounds.

The girls that came to the boom towns lived in rooming houses such as Charlie Guthrie managed. Many of them were church-going country girls with work-reddened hands. They learned very quickly to adapt themselves to new ways, spending their first wages on nail polish, high-heeled shoes, cigarettes, and corn liquor. Shy at first, they soon learned to imitate the slang, the small talk of the old-timers. Some of them got jobs in cafes and hotels but there was never enough work of that kind to go around. The women did their best to make the shacks livable but they fought a losing battle. No matter how they tried mopping, scrubbing, and cleaning, the floors remained crooked, the linoleum worn. And nothing could stop the dust. It seeped through the cracks, piled up in drifts on the floor, settled in people's hair, and streaked their faces black. Everyone breathed the dust into his lungs, and many came down with what was called "dust pneumonia." In Dust Pneumony Blues, Woody was to describe the condition with a certain gritty humor:

I've got that dust pneumony, pneumony in my lung,
I've got that dust pneumony, pneumony in my lung,
And I'm gonna sing this dust pneumony song.

I went to the doctor, and the doctor said, my son,
Yes, I went to the doctor, and the doctor said, my son
You got that dust pneumony and you ain't got long, not long.

Now there ought to be some yodelling in this song,
There ought to be some yodelling in this song,
But I can't yodel for the rattling in my lung.

Down in Texas my gal fainted in the rain,
Down in Texas my gal fainted in the rain,
I throwed a bucket o' dirt in her face just to bring her back again.

Once, tired of waltzing the broom at the boarding house, Woody got a job working a "root beer" stand. It paid a handsome three dollars a day.

"Now in addition to this root beer," the owner told Woody, "here's some bottles of another description." And he reached under the counter. "If anybody comes up and lays a dollar and a half on the counter, why you reach down and gently and firmly let him have one of these here bottles."

One day Woody's curiosity got the best of him. He opened a bottle and tasted whatever it was that cost half a day's salary. One fiery swallow told the whole story: it was pure unadulterated corn whiskey-a profitable item in those days of Prohibition. The whiskey store, however, played a role in Woody's musical education. The owner kept a guitar there and when there were no customers Woody spent his time picking out tunes and experimenting with chords.

Woody really learned how to play the guitar from his father's half brother, Jeff, a local deputy sheriff and one of the best fiddlers in the Texas Panhandle. Jeff called his two fiddles the "squawling panther" and the "wild cat in a Lost Canyon." An apt pupil, Woody was soon picking up extra money, accompanying his uncle at ranch and farmhouse dances, at Chamber of Commerce banquets, and at rodeos and "bust-down parties."

For some time, Jeff had been buying magic tricks through the mail and practicing at home. It was positively dangerous to walk around, for everything had a way of disappearing and reappearing. Strings and wires were fixed in such a way that you stumbled over yards of it every time you visited the house.

At last, in a burst of ill-advised enthusiasm, Jeff left the police force, and with $500 he had saved went into the magic-show business. Woody decided to go along. He quit his job at the whiskey store, bought an old gray wig, some chin whiskers and spirit gum, and joined his uncle's small company of players.

Jeff's wife Allene came along as accordionist and chief assistant. Her name was printed right across the accordion and set off with fake diamonds guaranteed to shine like the crown jewels.

Woody played the part of a bumbling comedian, stumbling over the trigger strings and wires, exploding guns, and setting skeletons dancing, rabbits hopping, and chickens flying.

Sometimes things went wrong. Then Woody would have to hold the attention of the crowd by telling stories, playing his harmonica, and singing while Jeff got the flying springs and balony sausages working right under his tuxedo jacket. When it was over, the folks shook hands and invited them back. But the money that came in rarely paid for their food; nor did it quite cover the cost of gas and oil for the car.

For a brief time, the magic show traveled on a shoestring to every town and village in the Panhandle; then it folded. Who, in that miserable winter of 1931-1932 had money for groceries, let alone the price of a ticket to a magic show? One wintry night they played their last performance in the town of Old Mobeetie, just across the Oklahoma line. Their money was gone and Pampa was far away. If they tried, they might reach Jericho, Texas, where Aliened family, the Boydstuns, lived. Jeff headed the car toward Jericho.

It was a cold, snowy, sloshy night. The chains rumbled under the fenders. The mud and the sticky Texas gumbo soil clogged the wheels. It was a frightful trip. Now and then the car would stop, and everyone would pile out into the freezing night to pry or kick off the mud that glued itself stubbornly to the tires.

As things turned out, they weren't the only ones to make their way to Jericho. By mid-winter, Maud and Robert Boydstun's house had become the refuge for down-and-out friends and relatives-including Charlie Guthrie, who had lost his job in Pampa. Cliff and Lesley, two cowboy guitar-pickers who had appeared in some of the magic shows, dropped in for food and shelter. With Allene, Jeff, and Woody the grand total came to eight hungry, shivering adults.

Once the Boydstuns' small store of food disappeared into eight stomachs, the household fell back on sugar syrup and cornbread as a steady diet. Sometimes they roasted corn meal for coffee. When things really got bad, Robert Boydstun would walk two miles to a neighbor's house, begging for a handful of flour.

The Boydstuns were farming people. Robert, whose father and mother had been homesteaders in the Amarillo wheat country when Indians roamed the Texas plains, had planted 640 acres a year for more than 40 years. Robert could remember standing belly deep in the threshed wheat, scooping it into the bins with a big shiny steel shovel, loading it on the truck, hauling it over rough country roads to the elevator, and then heaving it onto freight cars. He had worked hard and never asked any questions.

Now here it was, the middle of the winter, and neither he nor Maude knew where their next biscuit was coming from. They had raised enough wheat in their time to feed ten generations but the land was no longer their own. High winds and hundreds of dust storms made farming precarious, but they had somehow survived the weather. The trouble in their lives began when gas-engined combine harvesters took over and did with two men what forty used to do. The competition was too great. The bank sent the sheriff to foreclose on the property. Penniless, with no one to turn to, they moved into an old ramshackle, draughty house, with little furniture, no tools, and a bare cupboard. Robert's pride was hurt; he was a man, not a dog to be kicked out into the cold.

They lived through the month-long blizzard as best they could. Charlie and Robert played dominoes day and night, huddling in front of the little stove for warmth.

When Charlie tired of dominoes, he wrote long love letters to a lady, a trained nurse he had met through the mails. Each day he sent her two pages covered with carefully written script even though the pain in his twisted fingers made the going rough. The house was kept fairly lively with music. Jeff played the fiddle. Cliff the guitar, and Lesley sang. Woody thumped on the guitar, and learned old-time songs from the old folks. With Allene wheezing away on her accordion, the band sounded pretty good. When the spirit (or the freezing temperature) moved them, they danced as Woody sang his own song:

Grab your partner, swing around
Kiss yo' honey and go to town!
Hug yo' gal like swinging on a gate
Meet yo' partner and promenade.
Hurry up, boys and don't go slow
It may be the last time, I don't know.

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