United States & World

Voices from the Dust Bowl

Published July 28, 2005 at 12:00 AM EDT

In 1940, Charles Todd was hired by the Library of Congress to travel around California and record the lives, stories and music of Dust Bowl refugees. Todd made the trip with Robert Sonkin, and they traveled around the state's central valley — the flat, agricultural land John Steinback wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. Lugging a 50-pound recording machine, the two men created an oral history of refugees from Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas who had left their draught and depression-ravaged homelands to look for jobs in the west.

The thousands of refugee farmers who showed up in California in the late 1930s outnumbered the jobs that were available. Many ended up living in migratory labor camps created for them by the Farm Security Administration.

There, despite great poverty and displacement, they created vibrant communities. They told stories, sang love ballads, debated amongst themselves and held square dances. The sounds of their new lives were captured by Todd and Sonkin using a "Presto" recorder that imprinted sound on aluminum discs.

In this piece from Lost and Found Sound, Charles Todd talks about the places he visited and the people he recorded.

Below are the names of the Dust Bowl refugees heard in this story.

The King Family: Cotton Eyed Joe

Charlie Spurlock: "Red dust storm ..."

Floyd Jones: harmonica, She Ain't That Kind

Flora Robertson: "Black cloud ..."

Tom Higginbotham: "Chickens starve ..."

Huber, Ruth and Judd Lois: Going Down the Road Feeling Bad

Roy Turner: "... left OK walkin..."

J. W. Becker: "... didn't have money..."

Sherman Loop: "... house trailer ... "

Mr. and Mrs. Stankewitz: Charming Betsy