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 children's 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.