LINDA WERTHEIMER, host: This is NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Linda Wertheimer, with another story from the series "Lost and Found Sound," our search through America's recorded legacy.
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In the 1930s, farmers in the Great Plains were facing poverty and starvation. Jobs were scarce during the Depression, and a series of droughts and dust storms literally dried up many family farms in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas. Thousands of people packed up their belongings and headed west to California in search of work. The steady stream of new migrants was more than California could handle. To ease the burden, the Farm Securities Administration, a New Deal program, established several migratory labor camps throughout California. The camps gave thousands of homeless migrants a safe place to live where they could rekindle a sense of community and culture.
In the summer of 1940, Charles Todd was hired by the Library of Congress to document life in the migrant labor camps. Todd used a 50-pound Presto disc recorder which he lugged from camp to camp, recording hundreds of hours onto aluminum and cardboard discs. There are songs, testimonials, poems, dances and stories about fleeing the drought, the hard journey west and the hope that the camps revived. Charles Todd recounts that summer 60 years ago with his original recordings in this story, "Voices from the Dust Bowl."
Mr. CHARLES TODD:
That's him all right. Uh-uh, that's too big for you, isn't it? All right, we're all here in the recreation hall at the Shafter Camp, and we're going to get together and sing a song just to test out this machine.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC (KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA: "Cotton Eyed Joe")
Mr. TODD: The recordings were made in the summer of 1940 in California. We went from Visalia in the north all the way down to Brawley in the south. There were 12 of these huge camps out there, and we went to all of them.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC (KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA: "Cotton Eyed Joe")
KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA: (Singing) Where did ya come from, where did ya go? Where did ya come from, Cotton Eyed Joe. Come from the city, I come from the shore, come from a place called Cotton Eyed Joe.
Mr. TODD: Migratory labor camps sponsored by the Farm Security Administration, one of Mr. Roosevelt's many organizations that got us through the Depression.
KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA: (Singing) Cotton Eyed Joe had a new suit of clothes. Nobody knows where he got them clothes...
Mr. TODD: Well, the migration began as a result of the terrible dust storms that hit Oklahoma and Arkansas and the Panhandle of Texas back around 1936 and '37, and it caused what has become known as the Dust Bowl.
CHARLIE SPURLOCK (Arvin Farm Security Administration Camp 1940/07/28): There come what we call a red dust storm which come from the west. It tore the roofs off of the larger buildings, of small buildings and blowed them completely away and turned cars over; and the dust was so thick that you could see nothing at all, just as dark as it could possibly be.
SOUNDBITE OF HARMONICA MUSIC (FLOYD JONES: "She Ain't That Kind")
Mrs. FLORA ROBERTSON (Shafter FSA Camp 1940/08/05): Such a huge, black cloud, just looked like smoke out of a train stack or something. And we had cattle; it killed them 'cause they was out in it. And we would cut their lungs open and it looked just like a mud pack or something.
TOM HIGGINBOTHAM (Yuba City FSA Camp 1940/08/18): Five or six hundred chickens; they all starved to death, or a large percent of them. Two or three cows starved to death. So I told the folks in the spring, I says, `The way everything's turned out and money's so hard to get,' I says, `I guess we'll just load up and leave out. I just worried my head off for the last five or six years trying to make everything meet, and I'm getting tired of worrying.'
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC MUSIC (Ruth Huber Lois Judd: "Going Down The Road Feeling Bad")
RUTH HUBER LOIS JUDD: (Singing) Goin' down the road feeling bad. I'm going down the road feeling bad. I'm going down that road feeling bad, O Lord, and I ain't gonna be treated this a'way.
Mr. TODD: It were mostly people of English, Irish and Scotch descent who came over here generations ago and when the Dust Bowl came, the people in California, the farmers out there, began to send bulletins saying that there were a lot of jobs in California, pea picking, grape picking, so forth. As a result, 300,000 came instead of what they were hoping for, about 2,000 or so. But California got a little petrified and scared to death with this huge influx of migrants coming in. It was far more than they could use or take.
ROY TURNER (Visalia FSA Camp 1941/08/30): When I left Oklahoma I was walking, me and my wife and two babies. We come into Texas and we got us an old rattle-trap car.
Ms. HUBER Ms. JUDD: (Singing) Two-dollar shoe hurts my feet. Two-dollar shoe hurts my feet, O Lord, and I ain't gonna be treated this a'way.
Mrs. J. W. BECKER (Shafter FSA Camp 1940/08/16): Of course, we didn't have the money to just say, `Well, let's buy a ticket and we'll go to California.' So we had to work our way. So from Dallas, Texas, we went on out to Clovis, New Mexico.
SHERMAN LOOP (Visalia FSA Camp 1941/08/30): I loaded up my personal belongings into a little house trailer that I bought, 15-foot long, seven-foot wide, hooked it on behind the Model A Ford and we started. While traveling through the country and going over the mountains at Grand Island, Nebraska, our house trailer came unhooked, went over a mountainside and destroyed practically everything that we had except our Model A Ford.
Mr. Mrs. STANKEWITZ: (Singing "Charming Betsy") Rich gal, she ride in a big limousine. Poor gal, she do's the same. My gal, she rides in a T Model Ford, but she's ridin' just the same. She'll be coming 'round the mountain, charmin' Betsy. She'll be coming 'round the mountain, Cora Lee...
Mr. LOOP: The next morning, I says to the wife, `We've got 52 cents; we've got to get out and get us a job. Wife and I and boy loaded in our personal belongings and drove for eight continual hours, stopping at every ranch hunting for something to do. We run onto a rancher who wanted someone to spray. My boy and I had never sprayed an apple tree in our life and never knew anything about it, but he was man enough to offer us a job at 30 cents an hour, moved us into a little cabin which you could throw a cat through the roof, and the stove was just about ready to fall down, the cook stove. We moved into it and slept on the floor, wife and I and the boy, for a week while we sprayed to get enough money so that we could live decently. We sprayed there for 18 weeks, and my rheumatism got so bad that the doctor advised me that I'd better come to California or else go back home and get ready to die.
Mr. Mrs. STANKEWITZ: If I never get to see you again, Good Lord, remember me.
Mr. TURNER (poem: "Oklahoma Farewell"): Started this poem in 1939, on May the 4th, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and started to California.
`In that dear state of Oklahoma in the city where buildings are high, I laid on my pillow so hopeless, looking through my tin shack at the sky. I got up early next morning, out in the cold I did creep. Walked off without any breakfast and left two hungry babies asleep. And then I left that big city, I walked down 60 Highway(ph). I had a good reason for leaving, so I headed for Pacific Bay. Then I seen the Texas cotton and the magical bottomless lakes and the Arizona Gila monster and the big diamond rattlesnakes. One night I heard the little coyotes; I listened to their pitiful whine. I wondered if the poor little creatures didn't have hungry babies like mine. I started this poem on the desert, my bed lying out on the ground, then covered up my hungry babies and smoked a cigarette and laid down. Then I picked peas in California from two to six hampers a day, trying to make a few pennies to drive that old hungry away. Oklahoma, farewell.'
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC (NORMAN NELSON- guitar: "Wildwood Flower")
<HTAG BREAK=Y VAL='pWAYNE !QGENE!Q DINWIDDIE (Visalia FSA Camp 1941/08/30): And we stopped off in New Mexico and worked for theSnow ranch. Picked cotton for 75 cents and under. Mostly Mexicans andthe contractors beat you out of the little cotton you'd pick, so westarted on for Arizona.</p'>
Mr. HIGGINBOTHAM: The living condition in Arizona is mighty bad for a worker on a farm, for you sleep on the ground, you know. We're just treated as mules and hardly as good as mules because they think a whole lot of the mules.
Mr. DINWIDDIE: And then we come on over to California in '38, and at that time came quite a flood here in California. And we landed on Point Conception, furthest point west, picking peas. And people was just about starved to death, and no way to get any groceries; and people would go down to the preacher, and the preacher had a mother who had some money and she brought it in to him. And he would take six-shooters, old tires, anything you could pawn for a little money to buy groceries with. And that went on for two or three weeks; and then we went on up north to Winters, California, and picked almonds, peaches, pears.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC (JACK BRYANT: "Sunny Cal")
Mr. TODD: In the beginning, before the government put in the Farm Security Administration migrant camps, before that, they went in what they called the ditch bank camps, which were just tents that had been put up by the farmers in ditch banks. There was a lot of malnutrition; the kids, little towheaded kids were in pretty bad shape, with pellagra and other diseases, malnourishment mostly. A great many of the people died from asthma and other lung diseases, and they were in terrible shape when they arrived in California, most of them.
Mr. BRYANT: (Singing "Sunny Cal"): But listen to me, Okies, I came out here one day; spent all my money gettin' here, now I can't get away.
Mr. TODD: It was all a big emergency situation, and the Farm Security Administration just had to build these camps. People were suffering in California.
Mr. BRYANT: (Singing) It rained all night long, boy, thought we all would drown. We all got the flu from sleeping on the ground.
Mr. TODD: They put in 12 of them in California, and each one took about 2,000 or 3,000 people.
Mr. BRYANT: (Singing) Now listen to me, Okies, I'll hand it to you straight. I came out here eight weeks ago and I haven't worked a day. But now I'm on relief for I guess I've done my best; if it wasn't for old Uncle Sam, I guess we'd starve to death.
RUBY RAINS: This is a song that was composed in the 1939 Oregon cotton strike. Three strikers composed this song, including myself. The title is "Associated Farmers Have a Farm."
(Singing) Associated Farmers have a farm, E-I-E-I-O...
Mr. TODD: They had a group known as the Associated Farmers. They were convinced that this was a Communist plot. Let me read you just one thing that was said that I took down verbatim. `The whole proposition is Communist through and through. It stinks of Russia. Our women won't be safe on the streets with these people. We never wanted this camp in here. White men are no good in our business. We like our Mexicans; they don't complain, and they don't ever do any organizing. As for those bulletins which they said we sent out to get those migrants here, they're the work of the Communist Party, we've checked on it. The Reds are burrowing from within. You know how they work.'
Ms. RAINS: (Singing) And every day, we have a picket line, C-I-C-I-O.
Mr. TODD: I picked that up from a mayor of one of the towns down in Brawley, California, down in Imperial Valley. And I went and called on him to get his reactions, and he was pretty angry about everything. They were angry at me, too; I was asking too many questions.
AUGUSTUS MARTINEZ (El Rio): And those ranchers, it got to be that if we talked back or even sang in the orchards or talked, you know, with somebody else picking around there, one would come up to us and tell us, `You'd better shut up, you're not supposed to sing; you're not supposed to whistle; you're not supposed to do anything,' like peons. That's what gets all the people here all bothered, because right now they have work. Most of them have work, but they haven't got any money to rent a house with. And the first money they start earning, they have to pay it for food. So how do you expect them to pay rent?
Ms. MARY CAMPBELL: This is Mary Campbell.
Ms. BETTY CAMPBELL: This is Betty Campbell.
Ms. M. CAMPBELL: And we're from the Shafter Government Camp and we're going to sing a government camp song. It was written by my sister and I.
CAMPBELL SISTERS: (Singing "Government Camp Song") Over here in the government camp, that's where we get our government stamps, over in that little rag house home. Over in the isolation, that's where we get our vaccinations, over in that little rag house home.
Mr. HIGGINBOTHAM: And the government camps that we lived in that--the government has never spent a dollar that's done people more good than these government camps, not even money that's been loaned to the railroads and big corporations. I don't think it's helped the country any more or it's put more enjoyment in life for people than these here country camps.
Mrs. BECKER: We had a lot of sickness, and the ones that were on the sick committee--like myself; I was on the sick committee--we'd make the rounds every morning in each unit, and if there was anyone that needed medical care, they were turned in at the clinic, at the nurse. So everything fared well. We've lost only a very few cases. Everything was taken care of very nicely.
Mr. TODD: They began as just tent camps, then metal shelters. And you would get a family of seven or eight people in a one-room metal shack. But they had excellent recreation facilities and a big hall for entertainment, and even had a library. And when I was doing my recordings, each camp had its own little newspaper put out by the Okies.
Mr. LOOP: The music is furnished by the King Family Orchestra that played for the "Grapes of Wrath" moving picture. All right, let's go.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC BY THE KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA ("Girl I Left Behind")
Mr. TODD: The King Family. Yes, the King Family was the nearest thing to a professional group the Okies had, and we found them in one of the camps.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC BY THE KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA ("Girl I Left Behind")
Mr. TODD: They did a lot of very strange variations on 200-year-old ballads.
KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA: Folks, this is the King Family playing on some instruments that we made ourselves out of some gourds, like we might call them soap gourds or powder gourds, or whatever the old-time gourds might have been. So we have some instruments; Harlan(ph) is playing the guitar; Charles playing the mandolin; Sid(ph) playing a violin; and the tenor banjo myself; Billy(ph) playing the bass violin. So here we go with the gourds.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC BY THE KING FAMILY ORCHESTRA)
Mr. TODD: The camp manager would get on the loudspeaker and announce that there'd be an event in the social hall that night; they were going to record some music and play some music and so forth.
SQUARE DANCE CALLER #1 (Shafter FSA Camp): (Singing) ...(Unintelligible) around a lady. And around Mama's baby, ...(unintelligible)
Mr. TODD: Saturday nights was a terrific night.
SQUARE DANCE CALLER #1: (Singing) I'd just twirl her round and round we go; and where we stop nobody knows.
Mr. TODD: They had a huge dance, and it was line dancing and square dance; and a very good band, orchestra, made up by the Okies themselves. And it was usually fiddle and guitar and banjo and mouth organs. But it was just old time country music.
FRED ROSS: The name of this song is "Cotton Fever" and it was written by an Arvin camper during last season's cotton.
Mr. TODD: It was a Presto machine, called a Presto recorder...
Mr. ROSS: (Reciting) Along the road on either side, cotton's green and two miles wide.
Mr. TODD: ... and it was a very cumbersome thing at about 50 pounds or so. And it had aluminum discs covered with acetate.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC ("Cotton Fever")
SQUARE DANCE CALLER #2: (Singing) First ...(unintelligible) swing, swing right out and ...(unintelligible)
Mr. TODD: We had records that were acetate on cardboard, too; and we would always--after we recorded somebody on regular records, we would do one on cardboard that they could play themselves and keep. So that's helped. And we had them fighting to be heard; had no trouble getting them to record at all, and they loved looking at the machine. The kids were absolutely unbelievably excited about it.
DONALD LEACH: This one's a frog (makes sound of frog croaking). Freight train (makes sound like freight train).
Mr. TODD: It was a very primitive outfit. Sometimes it would stick, get stuck. It would do all kinds of strange things.
Mr. LEACH: Dog (makes sound of dog barking).
Mr. TODD: And it was just like a regular Victrola; you put the disc on, the big recording--it looked just like a phonograph record--put it on the machine, turn the machine on; the record went around and the needle cut the grooves in the recording and it made the recording. There was no tape at all.
Mrs. MARY SULLIVAN: (Singing "Barbara Allen") All in the merry month of May, when the green-brown plains were swelling, young Jimmy Gray(ph) on his death bed lay for the love of Barbara Allen.
Mr. TODD: And as I was walking through the Okie camp, I heard a woman singing, and I recognized what she was singing. It was an old 17th-century ballad called "Barbara Allen."
Mrs. SULLIVAN: (Singing) Then you must do my...
Mr. TODD: And I asked her where she had learned that; she said from her mother.
Mrs. SULLIVAN: (Singing) ...if your name be Barbara Allen.
Mr. TODD: I began to ask around about it, and I found dozens of people who knew these old songs that were a hundred or more years old.
Mrs. JOY PIKE: This is an old song that I learned from my daddy.
Mrs. PIKE (Singing "Dandoo" with RUSS PIKE, guitar) Lil' ol' man come in from the plow, Dandoo, Dandoo...
Mr. TODD: They're very good. And that woman, Mrs. Pike, the one who sang "Dandoo," and it was a lovely voice.
Mrs. PIKE: (Singing) Lil' ol' man come in from the plow, lil' ol' woman got dinner ready now ..(unintelligible)
Mr. TODD: I was amazed at the number of good guitar players. Practically everyone we ran into had a guitar stashed away somewhere.
Mrs. PIKE: (Singing) Piece of old, dry bread laying on the shelf, tom a clash, tom a kingle; piece of old, dry bread laying on the shelf; you want any dinner you can cook it yourself. Bloom, bloom, blag a dag ol'.
Mrs. RUTH ELLIOT: (Singing) Oh, the old apple tree in the orchard, it lives in my memory, 'cause it reminds me of my pappy who was handsome, young and happy when he planted the old apple tree. So one day Pappy took Widow Norton(ph), out on a jamboree; and when he brought her home at sunup, brother Norton raised his gun up and he chased Pappy up in the tree.
Mr. TODD: And the fact that we were working for the government, the Library of Congress, we sort of hinted to the Okies that whoever we were recording, that probably a good many people in Washington, DC, would hear the stories that they told and hear their music and so forth and it might be helpful to the Okies. And so the Okies sang like the devil and did a lot of telling of stories.
Mrs. ELLIOT: (Singing) When the neighbors came after my pappy, up in the tree was he. The neighbors stuck a rope and strung him by the neck and then they hung him to a branch on the old apple tree.
Mr. TODD: Where'd you learn that one?
Mrs. ELLIOT: In Oklahoma.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
Mr. TODD: And sure enough, we did play these records, all of them, for Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House. We were invited there and played them, so I haven't felt guilty about all that. I remember it all very well. It was very moving business, the whole thing.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC (NORMAN NELSON- guitar: "Wildwood Flower")
WERTHEIMER: "Voices from the Dust Bowl" was narrated and recorded by Charles Todd. Our story was produced by Barrett Golding and edited by Jeff Rogers. The executive producers of "Lost and Found Sound" are The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, and Jay Allison.
You're listening to NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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