Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Audio files are DELIBERATELY encoded "low-fi" to enable faster streaming and are intended as "illustrations" and "appetizers" only. Official and "hi-fi" recordings can (and should) be purchased at your local record dealer or through a number of web-based companies, like CDNow.
I stayed with Will and Herta Geer in a fancy apartment up on 59th and Fifth Avenue, which rented for A Hundred and Fifty a month. I thought at first that was for a whole year.
I sang at a hundred IWO lodges and met every color and kind of a human being you can imagine. I moved from Will and Herta's and lived down along the Bowery for a few months. I wrote an article every day for the Daily Worker, called Woody Says.
I met Alan Lomax and he carried me down to Washington to the Library of Congress where they recorded several hours of questions and answers and all of the songs I could remember on a pint of pretty cheap whiskey.
I met up with Peter Seeger, a long tall string bean kid from up in New England and we worked together putting a book of several hundred songs together.
We bought us a Plymouth and drove down through the South and then crossed over into Oklahoma to sing for the Hooversville Camptowners "Community Camp" on the rim of Oklahoma's worst garbage dump. I made up my song, "Union Maid" on the typewriter of Bob and Ina Wood, the organizers of the Communist Party in Oklahoma. They gave me as good a feeling as I ever got from being around anybody in my whole life. They made me see why I had to keep going around and around with my guitar making up songs and singing. I never did know that the human race was this big before. I never did really know that the fight had been going on so long and so bad. I never had been able to look out over and across the slum section nor a sharecropper farm and connect it up with the owner and the landlord and the guards and the police and the dicks and the bulls and the vigilante men with their black sedans and sawed off shot guns.
Mussolini had already bombed and strafed the Ethiopians to death, and Hitler was waving his arms and doing little jig dances toward Poland.
Then I sent for Mary and the kids in Oklahoma and I got jobs on the big New York radio shows, Pursuit of Happiness, Cavalcade of America, Back Where I Come From, Pipe Smoking Time, WNYC's Music Festivals, and bought a new forty-one Pontiac.
I got disgusted with the whole sissified and nervous rules of censorship on all of my songs and ballads, and drove off down the road across the southern states again.
In the mountains of north California later we got a registered letter that told us to come up to the Columbia River to the Bonneville and the Grand Coulee dam, to the office of the Bonneville Power Administration. Well, I talked to people, I got my job, it was to read some books about the Coulee and Bonneville dams, to walk around up and down the rivers, and to see what I could find to make up songs about. I made up twenty-six. They played them over the loud speakers at meetings to sell bonds to carry the high lines from the dams to the little towns. The private power dams hated to see these two babies born to stand up out there across those rockwall canyons, and they pulled every trick possible to hold up the deal, saying that the materials would be wasted and could be used to build a big war machine to beat Hitler with. Our argument was that we could run a thousand towns and factories, farms, with these two power dams, and turn out aluminum bombers to beat Hitler a lot quicker with. And our side won out on top.
