![]() ![]() In the graphic novel Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads, artist Nick. Picking up a harmonica and eventually a battered guitar, Guthrie finds solace in the ancient lineage of folksong. I think we call this the American spirit. Woody Guthrie was nothing if not a storyteller, so it makes perfect sense for his life to be fictionalised. Using the sepia tones of the Dust Bowl as his palette, author and artist Nick Hayes tells the story of world-famous folkie Woody Guthrie (19121967), starting in the 1920s when Guthrie was a teenager supporting himself in dried-up, post-boomtown Oklahoma. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. But there is something more important for those who will listen. In Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, Steinbeck wrote of Guthrie: "Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. Hugely influential, Dust Bowl Ballads has been revered by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. ![]() Along the way, characters are forced into theft, murder, and unbearable hardship against a biblical backdrop of the American West. Using only guitar and vocals, the album follows the exodus of Midwesterners headed for California and mirrors both Guthrie’s own life and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. Recorded in 1940, and later reissued by Folkways Recordings in 1950, Guthrie’s first album chronicles the American Dust Bowl through his prosaic style of talking blues. ![]()
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