Part One: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon

Robert and Margaret sit down for their annual anti-bastard episode about one of America's greatest heroes, folk musician Woody Guthrie.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
podcast by Judge Robert Evans.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
The Honorable Judge Robert Evans presiding over the Court of Bastards.
And you know, I announced last week that I am
now officially a legal United States municipal judge, and I
think a lot of people thought that was a bit
We thought I was joking, And I just want to say, folks,
I would never joke about that, because as soon as

(00:34):
I was sworn in, I was handed a case to
rule on. And I've been thinking NonStop about it for
the last two weeks. And I know the Supreme Court's
got a lot of important cases coming up, obviously, but
they all pale in comparison to this question, which is
which of the lestats in the different interviews with a

(00:56):
vampire is more fuckable? And I have my ruling here
is the Is the jury ready to hear it? Our
jury today, including Margaret Kiljoy and Sophie Lichterman, Are you
guys ready to hear my ruling on this one?

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I am, although I've only seen the evidence produced about
the nineties interview with the vampire.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Oh you got to watch the new TV show It's
Hot as hell. Uh, and that's who I go with.
Is the is the TV Robert.

Speaker 4 (01:21):
Have you ever heard of jury nullification?

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Uh? Huh.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
You can't nullify me on this, Oh uh, because because
because he's just so hot, look at him? Look at him, Sophie.
Have you not looked at him?

Speaker 3 (01:33):
You're asking me to look at him? Now?

Speaker 4 (01:34):
Are you asking me to look up what a man
looks like and say if they are hot or not?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Because I refuse.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
I wouldn't. I wouldn't call him just a man because
he's supernaturally good looking. Anyway. The old one is just
gare yes, uh yeah, whereas the new one looks like, uh,
I don't know, kind of like a little bit of Viking,

(02:00):
little bit of French sex. Body's good, he's good. It's
a good TV show. Everybody watched the new Interview with
a vampire. That's my ruling, Margaret, How are you feeling,
I'm feeling.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Like I I like vampires show. I struggle with vampires
stuff though, because I'm incredibly squeamish. But I love the
romance of vampires and the like sorrow of living forever
and all of that. So I sometimes start watching vampire
movies and then they start eating people, and I'm like,
this is too much for me, And I'm like, well,
what did I think was going to happen?

Speaker 2 (02:32):
It's okay, they're occasionally sad about eating people in the
TV show.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
I have a question for the two of you. Okay,
would you become vampires? Have given the choice?

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Absolutely?

Speaker 5 (02:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Why not?

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Sophie?

Speaker 4 (02:43):
Could I still have my dog?

Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah? You can have your dog. You just can't hang
out with your dog in the day.

Speaker 4 (02:49):
Yeah, lest time with my dog not into it.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Well, it's the same amount of time, it's just inverted.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
I just like the idea of.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
Eating people, Like I hang out with her at night
and during the day, So whatever gives me the most
amount of hours with Anderson.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yeah. Can you make a vampire out of Anderson? Would
she live forever? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (03:11):
Oh, Anderson, we're vampires. We're fucking vampires.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Can you make dogs into vampires in standard vampire mythology?

Speaker 4 (03:19):
In Margaret's world?

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Okay, well, I mean vampires can turn into dogs. So
I feel like there's like there's clearly a blurring of
the line between human and dog and vampire world. So
we might actually just become peers with our dogs, in
which case it's an even easier choice. The hardest part
for me is the drinking of the blood. But you
know what, I'd be willing to accept.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
There's a lot of people whose blood I'd drink. There's
a lot of people drink in my blood. I might
as well have some of theirs.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
Most of the people I've asked this have said no.
So I'm impressed with you too.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, I'm down. I'm ready to do the vampire shit again.
Interview with a vampire makes it seem incredible.

Speaker 4 (03:55):
I really loved Vampire Diaries. It's my one, like really
bad CW show, but I'm like, that was such a
good experience for me the seventeen times I watched it.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
I get to be best friends with the guy who
played bel Rios in the Foundation TV show. It's a
great idea. I'm picking vampire okay again based entirely off
this TV show.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
This is going to be a really long cul of
bent Macpi. At one time, I went to a grocery
store and the Vampire Diaries actor brothers, they're not real
brothers in real life. Were they're trying to sell their
bourbon and their dog licked my face and it was
a really good experience. I'm just saying it was a
really good experience for me, and I immediately had to
record with Robert and Jamie afterwards, and they're like, what's

(04:41):
wrong with you? Why do you keep why are you
smiling some big and I was like, I was like
Vampire Diaries, brother's dog licked my face and they're like,
I was like, you don't understand.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Here's the thing. Yeah, vampires consume the blood of human
beings in order to stay alive, and so do essentially
most of the people who run our country, which is
why people have been up in arms and very interested
in some stuff that's been happening in the news recently. Sure,
but this brings me to the subject of our annual
Non Bastards episode. A guy who became very aware of

(05:16):
the fact that there were bloodsuckers murdering all of his
friends and loved ones and decided, well, fuck, I don't
know what else to do but sing some songs about it.
This week we're talking about Woody Guthrie. Yeah, yeah, Margaret,
what do you know about Woody?

Speaker 3 (05:31):
Well, I get him mixed up with Utah Phillips in
my head even though I shouldn't, and I believe Woody
is this machine kills fascist guitar? Not Utah? Right, he
sure is, yes, And is he the list of stuff
for the New Year or is that utah?

Speaker 2 (05:48):
I think that's utah.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
Okay, this land is your land.

Speaker 5 (05:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Well, they always cut out the good verses about getting
rid of private property.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah yeah, and to be fair, he cut out the
good verses. We're going to talk about that in these episodes.
We're going to talk a lot of Woody because Woody
is a complicated figure. This is going to be one
of our famous Ooh, let's talk about the morality and
ethics of a guy who lived and was born into
a world that most of the people alive have trouble comprehending.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
Episode yay, every history episode ever.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is a good time
to be talking about Woody because fascism, as it was
when he was a young man, fascism seems to be
ascendant around the world. There are outlawed gunmen carrying out
attacks on capitalist institutions that symbolize the poverty and suffering
that have made a lot of people miserable. And yeah,
you know a lot of the people who have listened

(06:43):
to this episode were probably forced out of their homes
for some period of time this year due to one
kind of environmentally influenced disaster or another, a not insignificant
chunk of the audience given the hurricanes and fires, YadA, YadA, YadA.
And that's the way things were in Woody's day two.
So let's learn a little bit about America's greatest folk singer,

(07:05):
or at least the patron saint of all American folk singers,
Woody Guthrie. Cool, and we're back. So if you're not familiar,
as we stated, he's the author of This Land is
Your Land. He's the author of all You Fascists Are

(07:25):
Bound to Lose, and a whole bunch of other socialist
and anti fascist protest ballads. He also wrote a shitload
of other well known American classics and a bunch of
unknown folks, and I should say an unknown number of
other folk songs. When I say unknown, I mean it.
There is no comprehensive accounting of how many songs wood

(07:46):
He wrote and like published, but credible estimates are somewhere
around a thousand or more.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
That's the way to do it.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
So this is a very prolific songwriter, right and you know,
a lot of the songs that would have written, rather
than being many were published in different songbooks and what
not and are still sung today. But a lot of
them only existed briefly in dingy little stages from New
Jersey to the Redwood Coast. So he's my kind of artist.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, I like that kind of guy.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, it's hard not to That said, when we talk
about his family background, there's some rough gotta be some
rough moments here, some rough moments in his own life.
This is not a guy who was unproblematic in any
comprehensive way.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
What a man who had power in interpersonal relationships wasn't perfect.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, we'll talk about how much power he He's a
little more complicated than that even Okay. Yeah. His grandfather
was born Jeremiah Purcell Guthrie in Bell County, South Texas,
and went by Jerry p Restless, as was the family condition.
He'd moved his family north to what was then known

(08:54):
as Indian Territory in eighteen ninety seven. Today we call
most of this Oak Oklahoma, and at the time it
is where the federal government had pushed a number of
tribes in order to pretend, hey, we're not trying to
dispossess you entirely. You got to keep moving, but keep moving,
but eventually like you'll land in this great area where
you know you guys will be safe forever. That's Oklahoma.

(09:17):
That's what becomes Oklahoma. It's just the Indian Territory in
this period. It's not a state. So during this period,
the government offered land grants in this territory up to
one hundred and sixty acres to anyone with quote unquote
Indian blood. And Jerry's second wife, Woody's dad, Charlie's stepmom
was one eighth creek. Now, obviously everything around this is

(09:38):
messed up and part of policies that were at best
ignorant and at worst genocidal. And we're not commenting on
the validity of how the government saw indigeneity at this
period of time, just saying this is how they handled it. Right.
So Charlie grew up and that's again Woody's dad grew
up in proto Oklahoma, which reads best as pro to Oklahoma.

(10:00):
I don't actually think. I don't know how well it
scans audibly anyway, on his dad's ranch, he was ambitious.
He studied business through correspondence courses. He also learned penmanship
through correspondence and took a correspondence course on boxing, which
makes a lot less sense to me. But okay, punch
hell yeah, punch better. Okay, wait, I'm a third letter.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Many people who are listening to this are basically doing
that with YouTube right now and not actually practicing right right.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah, he would have been a YouTube guy in a
different era. He would have been like watching videos on
how to punch better. Yeah, he was good enough at
the money stuff, like he does actually learn pretty well
how to manage money and handle business, and pretty soon
as a as a you know, a teenager, he's running
the family farm. Eventually, things are going well enough that
Jerry and Charlie sell what they have and Jerry moves

(10:56):
back down to Texas to start another ranch near the border,
whereas Charlie moves to a small town called Castle. In
nineteen oh two, he gets a job in a dry
goods store, and he meets Nora Tanner, the daughter of
a school teacher. In the two thousand and six biography Ramblin'
Man by Ed Cray, Here's how Nora is described. If

(11:16):
Kansas born Nora was not the prettiest girl. She was
among the most spunky. Inevitably, and here's where things take
a turn. People judged fourteen year old Nora as something
of a tomboy because of her spirited attitude. How else
would she assert herself in a house with three brothers
and sisters and three half brothers. Again, two thousand and
six is probably a little too late to be writing

(11:38):
about a fourteen year old girl who gets picked up
by a man in his twenties.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
That way, Yeah, not the prettiest, that's what that's what
we need.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
To love that. Now we are talking about Woody Guthrie's
dad here. I just want to remind you of that
this is not the subject of our episode. And gross
arrangements like and is this his mom?

Speaker 3 (11:58):
Is Nora the mom?

Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yes, Nora is his mom? And this is gross, but
this is also not a wildly uncommon arrangement. And Norah
and Charlie they meet when she's fourteen. They don't get
together immediately. He starts hanging around her and her family
and gets to know them for two years before marrying
her when she is sixteen, and he is like twenty five.

Speaker 4 (12:16):
Oh great, so many years still uncomfortably awful.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
Not great, still a creepy so respectful to just hang
out in two.

Speaker 4 (12:26):
Years two years to just lurk over a child.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah, yeah, just hanging out, making it really clear that
you're into this child.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, but not till they're in a I'm not defending this.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
Let's be clear. Charlie Guthrie sucks ass, but this is
not the worst thing Charlie Guthrie is going to be
involved in.

Speaker 4 (12:44):
Oh good, So he's just he's I'm glad we have
a bastard today.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Oh yeah, No, there's a bastard in this episode, and
it is It is Charlie. It's Woody Guthrie's dad. Definitely
on the bastard spectrum. So he starts reading law and
he gets involved in local Democratic Party politics Oklahoma. The
state is about to become a thing, and while you know,
it's unformed in this period, there's an opportunity for ambitious

(13:09):
young men to make names for themselves, and Charlie decides
he wants to do just that. He runs for a
district court position, and he wins election in nineteen oh
seven because all of the votes from local black men
were thrown out under false allegations of ballot stuffing. Yeah,
so Charlie's really just knocking him out of the park.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
The Democratic Party is not the same. No, this is
before the great inversion of these two parties.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah yeah, and he's he's just, yeah, comprehensively not a
nice guy. After winning, he takes his burgeoning family a
few miles away to Okema, a town which was having
an oil boom and was an exciting place to be
in nineteen oh seven, something no one has said about
Okeema since. For a few years, life was grand, and
Charlie gets rich. He acquired more than thirty properties, He

(13:56):
joined the Masonic lodge, He purchased the first automobile in
town in nineteen oh nine, and he became a fiery
anti socialist polemicist, giving ranting speeches about Eugene V. Debs,
the pro union socialist Rappele rouser and presidential candidate. So
I bet you're saying, Margaret, Wow, what a great dude.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
And I'm saying, like, haha, this guy had a socialist
kid ha.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
He sure did. And we're going to get to why.
But first, let's talk about a crime against humanity. Oh good, yeah, yeah,
everybody loves a good crime against humanity.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
That's why I come on bastards.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Uh huh.

Speaker 4 (14:32):
I thought that's what you were doing to call the
ad Briggs, which you could do right now if you'd choose.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
It's okay, let's talk about a crime against humanity first.
That'll lead into the ad break.

Speaker 5 (14:40):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (14:40):
I thought you were talking about advertisements.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
But no, no, no, no, no, talking about horrible things great.
In late May of nineteen eleven, a black mother and
her son, Laura and LD Nelson, were taken into custody
after being accused of shooting and killing Ofisk County Sheriff's deputy,
George Loney. The deputy had been on their family land
going after a cow he believed had been stolen, and

(15:03):
a struggle ensued. Laura apparently grabbed for the deputy's gun first.
It's a little unclear exactly what happened, but her husband
wound up pleading guilty to larceny and so he was
away while Laura and LD were taken to a county jail.
As was often the case in situations like this, outrage
spread around the white families of the area. A crowd formed.

(15:25):
Woody Guthrie would later allege that his father was one
of the men who joined that crowd. They burst into
the county jail on the night of May twenty fourth,
raped Laura repeatedly, and then hung her and her fourteen
year old son until they were dead. As was usually
the case, local photographers took pictures of the lynching side
afterwards to sell his postcards. The photos of Laura's body

(15:46):
hanging dead are the only known surviving pictures of a
black female lynching victim. So there's a good chance people
have seen pictures from the lynching that Woody Guthrie's dad
did or helped do. Obviously, it wasn't just him horrible
I told you he sucked.

Speaker 5 (16:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, Charlie Guthrie not a nice man.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
Did he get to die painfully?

Speaker 2 (16:09):
He has a lot of pain in his life. Don't worry.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
Excellent.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
I'm not gonna say it makes you know. It equals
out though. So Woody was open about the fact that
his father had taken part in this lynching, and later
accused him of having donned clan robes.

Speaker 4 (16:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
So wood He's like, yeah, my dad was a clansman.
And he would later in life write several songs about
the lynching. One of them was based on a misconception
that Laura's two children were lynched. Her baby was probably
found alive nearby. The song was titled but a lot
of Woody songs about historical events are not literally about
what happened, right, Like there's you know, this is folk history,

(16:47):
right anyway. One of the songs that he wrote about
this event was titled don't kill my baby and my son.
And I haven't found Woody singing this song, but I
want to read some of the lyrics, and this is
kind of him sort of singing about this thing that
his dad did. As I walked down that old dark town,
in the town where I was born, I heard the
saddest lonesome moan I ever heard before my hair. It

(17:10):
trembled at the roots. Cold chills run down my spine.
As I drew near that jailhouse, I heard this deathly cry. Oh,
don't kill my baby and son. Oh don't kill my
baby and son. You can stretch my neck out on
that old river bridge, but don't kill my baby and son.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
So it's yeah, uh bad, I mean yeah, I don't
know what to say about that.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
I'm grateful for my dad, who the only time I've
ever seen a klansman in robes was as a kid,
and I was like driving with my dad and my
dad saw these like and we like stopped and they
were flying right and my dad just like rolled up
the windows, locked the doors and then fumed and it
realized and then later he was like, those people have guns,

(17:55):
That's why they're doing this. And I realized later it
was because he was justifying why he hadn't gotten out
of the car to fight four men. Yeah, you know,
to himself, because all he wanted to do was get
out of the car and fight them. Anyway. I just
I'm glad that I had the inverse dad. I don't know,
yeah for sure.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah. I mean I grew up in a small town
in Oklahoma and learned that one of my friend's dads
was in the clan, which is how I learned the
Klan was a thing, which was when my mom found
out when I stopped hanging out with that kid.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Which is also like, shout out to your mom about
that because you grew up in a more riot wing family, right.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Oh yeah, she was like absolutely not about this. Yeah,
fuck these people.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
There you go, there is a line.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah yeah, oh no, that was a hard line for
my mom. Yes. In nineteen twelve, the year after the lynching,
Woody Guthrie was born. But the introduction to Rambling Man,
written by Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Turkle, does a better
job of setting up his birth than I can. So
here's Studs. In nineteen twelve, the Titanic sank. In nineteen twelve,

(18:58):
Woodrow Wilson was elected pres In nineteen twelve, Woodrow Wilson
Guthrie was born. Fate sings its own kind of poetry.
The day was July fourteenth, Bastille Day in Paris, France.
Woodi's day in Okama, Oklahoma. That's good, Yeah, it's good. Intro.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
Also, it explains my big question, which was what would
he stand for? And now I know?

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
People were a lot more optimistic about Woodrow Wilson for
during this period of time, Mark there was a lot
of hope for old Woodrow Wilson in nineteen twelve. That's
going to prove to be somewhat shall we say, mistaken,
errantly taken?

Speaker 3 (19:40):
Right?

Speaker 2 (19:41):
But you know who you should have faith in?

Speaker 3 (19:45):
Is it our advertisers.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
It's our advertisers.

Speaker 4 (19:49):
About that.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
But yeah, would never, would never bring America into World
War One after promising not to. If our advertisers say
they're not going to send US troops to World World
War one, they're not going to send US troops to
World War one, you can you can take that as
a promise.

Speaker 3 (20:05):
I wish I believed you. But time machines just around
the corner.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
You probably shouldn't. They might, they might, they might, And
we're back. We are learning unfortunately that HelloFresh has committed
to send one hundred and fifty thousand US marines into France. Robert.

Speaker 4 (20:29):
It's like one of the least evil sponsors that we
have on our show, Sophie.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
They're necessary to stop the Kaiser's Men, you know, who
are are largely sponsored by me undies. If I'm not mistaken,
I know podcast World War one is going to be
a trip everybody.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
Yeah, but if you want to gamble on it, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
But if you want to gamble on it, yeah. So
Woody was the third of five kids, and his first
memories were of comfort and you know, like a degree
of wealth, if not outright opulence. He later wrote, our
house was full of the smells of big leather law
books and the poems of pomp and high dignity that
he his father memorized and performed over us. Charlie was

(21:11):
into music as well as racial murder, and he and
Nora would sing hymns, old spirituals and songs about saving
the lost and homeless. What he later recalled the color
of the songs was the red man, the black man,
and the white folks. And he's saying there that it
was like we learned songs that were like of the
common people of this country. I don't know that I

(21:31):
trusted Charlie to give him a great example of like
all of that, but that's what he later called and
what he's also going to there's a period of time
where he's really whitewashing his background and his father. Right,
He's going to make claims that like he was mentored
by a young black musician, you know, during kind of
in and around this period when he's a little kid.

(21:52):
Those don't seem to have been true. He later and
they admitted they were false. I think they were kind
of part of this period where he's trying to invent
a better backstory for himself.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, and there's also this like long standing way to
claim legitimacy, right of claiming blackness, Yes.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Especially within like American folk tradition. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
While his early years would have been comfortable, things began
to change quickly for the worse. His father paid to
construct a nice family home, which burnt down when Woody
was a toddler and damaged the family finances. In nineteen nineteen,
another fire hit the home they lived in, and his
sister Clara burned to death. Nora had gotten increasingly unstable
as she aged, and it's likely that we would have

(22:35):
I mean, we definitely have a diet. We learn what
she's got, right, and we'll be talking about that some
in part two because it becomes relevant for Woody. But
at the time they were just like, Oh, she's crazy,
she's got bad nerves. You know, she's losing it, right
like that. That's the way they talk about this at
the time.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
After Clara burned to death, Woody later said, my mother's
nerves gave way like an overloaded bridge. An essay on
Woody by the Library of Congress notes she even had
occasional violent episodes and may have set Charlie on fire.
In nineteen twenty seven, a situation that results in a
long and painful convalescence for him and a commitment to
the statemental hospital in Norman for her. We can't know

(23:17):
exactly what happened here. The best account we have is
that when he wakes up to the sound of kerosene
being splashed on his chest and then is on fire
and he manages to put it out although he's injured,
and the first thing he sees when he puts it
out is Noras standing over him, watching quietly.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
It's intense.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Now, Wood, he never was able to really admit that
this was what happened, right, that his mom lit his
dad on fire, And he certainly didn't admit like, well,
maybe his dad needed to get lit on.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Fire, right, Oh yeah, no, no, no crime was committed.
It's fine.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
Yeah, I think that's more or less where I land here.
But obviously this breaks up the family, right, Yeah, fair enough.
And Wood, he's never able to really kind of come
clean about precisely what happened. And also, you know, he's
young enough that maybe he doesn't fully know, right, maybe
this is kind of a mystery to him as well. Yeah,
because his dad probably doesn't want to admit it, right,
It's framed as an accident within the family. The most

(24:12):
Woody would ever say of his mom's mental state during
this period is that her mind went quote way over
yonder in a minor key, which is, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Wait, did he write that song wayere yonder in a
minor key?

Speaker 2 (24:23):
I think so.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
Yeah, That's one of my favorite songs. And every time
I pass a minor key, I'm like, I need to
get a picture with me here, but I never do it.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yep, Woody Guthrie, Yep, I like that song covered by
Billy Bragg, Like a lot of Guthrie songs, I mostly
know the Billy Bragg version. Yeah, yeah, I think most
of it at this point, most of us do. But
that's like kind of how Woody's music has been brought
down to us too, is by guys like Billy, by
guys like Bob Dylan too totally. So things get worse
very rapidly for the Guthrie family after this point. Charlie's

(24:52):
business interests folded and his land collapsed in value. He
had trouble finding good work after recovering from his injury,
and the Guthrie families arts to fall through the bottom
of their society. Charlie was forced to leave Oklahoma in
search of work with his two youngest children. Thus, Woody
and his older brother Roy had to stay in their
hometown alone to support themselves. They are fifteen or sixteen,

(25:14):
both when they're kind of left like, hey, figure it
out right now. Woody is largely unsupervised and also traumatized.
During this point in time, he works a series of
odd jobs, polishing spatoons and scavenging for scrap metal. So again,
this is a kid who is born into an emerging
wealthy class, but he never really gets to live that

(25:37):
way right like the bottom falls. He has early memories
of when the family had money, but very quickly, like
at fifteen or sixteen, he is polishing spatoons and living
on the streets. He's homeless. For a significant period of time.
He discovers the wonders of both tobacco and hard liquor.
For a period, he would hustle for money drunk playing

(25:58):
his harmonica. One remarkable performance earned him seven dollars, which
must have been a memory that's stuck with the young
man that like, oh, I actually have the ability to
like du okay based on like playing and performing for people.
I bet that's like one hundred bucks at least, right now, Yeah,
good money for a sixteen year old kid. He starts

(26:18):
writing the rails and traveling hobo style down to the
Gulf and back. People begin referring to him as a tramp.
Ed Cray is one of his biographer's rights. Woody scrounged
home cooked meals wherever he could. His friend, Colonel Martin
invited him home often enough. Guthru had lived with the
Martin family for three months. He moved in with the
Price family, quarreled and moved out for a week. He

(26:41):
slept in an unheated packing case converted into a hillside
gang clubhouse, until two members of his gang, brothers, Casper
and Floyd Moore, pleaded with their parents to let Woody
live with them. Tom and Nora agreed, and Woody moved
in with a wardrobe of two shirts and a pair
of minded overalls. So he's living on the edge here.

(27:01):
He's like again, he's a tramp, right, but he's he's
pretty liked. You know a lot of families in town,
you know, they like Woody. Their kids like Woody, and
they'll they'll take him in for a period of time
and he's also.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
This was like a kind of common way that they like, Yeah,
they like, hope, my grandfather's a hobo fairly shortly after
this in kind of the same region, and you know,
and it wasn't a file like yeah, you're like, it
wasn't a full Oh. I totally just live outside and
ride the rails. It was like, sometimes I ride the
rails and sometimes someone gives me a ride, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah, sometimes I'm living in an unheeded like fucking packing crate,
and sometimes I've got, you know, a room where I
get to crash on the equivalent of the couch.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
And he's he's you know, he's he doesn't have great hygiene.
He's famous for his shabby looks, but he's also in
demand for his musical skills. One of his hosts recalled
a night when he brought home sixty dollars in coins
from dancing and playing for the American Legion. Nora's husband
suggested he buys some new under with the money, and
Woody's response was, no need to, I wouldn't wear it. Instead,

(28:05):
he bought candy for their kids.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
He's a crosspunk.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
He is a crusspunk. Yes, He absolutely is a crusspunk,
and he uses his money to buy candy for his
friends who got him a place to crash.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Now, one interesting aside is that this particular family I'm
talking about had the last name More, which is my
mom's maiden name, and my family lived in Oklahoma in
this period. Maybe it should they have a good chance.
It's just probably is just a coincidence. But I don't
know all the branches of kin I had floating around
down there.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
That's cool. I like the Yess connection.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
I will have a more direct family connection to Woody
Guthrie later in these episodes, Nora Moore said this of
young Woody. Sometimes he was sad and didn't talk much.
He often sat for long periods, as if he were
in deep study. Then again, when he was with the
gang of Boys, he was lively. He seldom laughed, and
if he did it was short and quick. But he
was witty and smart. So you know, you've got a

(28:59):
thoughtful kid who's you know, definitely traumatized as well. And
there's something kind of magnetic about this young man too, right,
Like you you get that feeling just whenever you read
people who knew him in that period kind of talking
about him.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
He also okay, like, yeah, one he moved in with
another Nora, which is I mean.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, there's a lot of Nora's on that thicker on
the ground in this period.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yes, But also I was thinking putting it through that,
So his mom probably set Dad on fire, and I'm like, eh, whatever, Yeah,
his sister tying the horrible fire.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Uh huh.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
His mom might have killed his sister.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
He has bad luck around fires of his family, his
whole family does. He's just kind of flammable, his whole Yes,
the Guthries are unfortunately quite flammable. Okay, there's going to
be a really, a really unfortunate story involving that in
part two as well.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
All right.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
In nineteen twenty eight, his father called for him to
move to Pampa, Texas, near Amarilla, where some other members
of the family, including his uncle Jeff, who's quite a character, lived.
Before leaving, Woody visited his mother in the state hospital
one last time, and she didn't recognize him until the
very end of the visit, which has gone deeply traumatic
to this kid. Traveling to East Texas was not a

(30:19):
simple thing for a teenaged boy in nineteen twenty eight,
wood He had to busk and work odd jobs to
make his way down. Mostly, he sang and played harmonica
for workers on their lunch break at the railroad and
hotel lobbies and most off and outside of whorehouses. He
learned as he went, picking up tips from every musician
he came across. He later wrote, I followed the religious

(30:40):
street singers up and down the sidewalk and learned of
all the songs they sung. I never did learn how
to make tips off religious folks, because the best ones
are always broke. But some of the best songs I
ever heard, and some of the best feelings I ever had,
was when I catched some girl's eye beaten on a
skin drum tambourine singing Hi, Hallelujah. I love the way
he talked and wrote.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yeah, I know that's poetic as hell.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah. Texas provided Woody with both relief and an outlet
when his uncle Jeff taught him how to play the guitar.
Jeff was an award winning fiddle player and once would
he felt like he had a good bassline. He went
looking for other amateur musicians and they formed a band
called the corn Cob Trio. He fell in love with
the sister of one of his bandmates, Mary Jennings, and

(31:24):
the two were eventually married. Now, Uncle Jeff was one
of those sorts of men you'd best describe as a
real character. Ed Cray described him as a country fiddler,
great dreamer and a family of dreamers, fingerprint man, parlor musician,
and sometime faith healer. When wood He met him, Uncle
Jeff was a cop, but his ambition was to leave

(31:44):
that job for a career in music. In nineteen thirty
he lost it anyway, when a guy he wasn't friends
with got elected sheriff. Jeff made himself so quite a
fella police officer, faith healer, yeah, finger man, whatever the
fuck that means. Jeff made himself the manager of Woody's

(32:05):
amateur musical outfit after he gets fired as a cop.
So he's like, well, being a cop didn't work out.
I'm gonna try to turn these teenage boys into a
money ticket and he starts booking them gigs. He hatches
a scheme, because Jeff's a schemer, to get him a
slot performing with a traveling show put on by a
wealthy rancher. Because he was trying to entertain on a budget,

(32:27):
music was just one of the things they were hired
to do. Woody was expected to do stand up comedy
and to act as a magician as well. And the
only thing I need to tell you to make a
point of how cringey this would have been, is that
his routine involved the use of quote, flesh colored grease paint. Now,
sometimes he does seem to be dressing as a different

(32:49):
kind of white guy. He's got a freckle pencil and
I think he's like dressing as a redhead or something
like that sometimes, but he is doing blackface. He is
doing a lot of blackface this ad. There are minstrel
Show and Metas Show, which you're very racist, right, These
are shows that where the comedy hinges a lot on
the way white people think that black people talk, based
on again racist jokes.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
That is a big part of the comedy he is
doing at this stage in his life.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
Oh, Woody, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
And this is very like, this is a very normal
This is going to be in some to some extent
a normal kind of comedy. You know, it gets every
couple of years, it gets a little bit like whitewashed,
just a little bit more. If you'll forgive the term,
but like, if you watch the old Christmas movie White Christmas,
like there is a non black face minstrel show that

(33:39):
they do in that because and it's them talking about like, oh,
the music that we grew up with, right, the comedy
that we grew up with. Right, This shit stays a
lot longer than I think a lot of people are
necessarily aware, but.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
And want to admit to themselves.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, yeah, and want to admit to themselves.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
I want to admit to their grandkids.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Huh yeah. And again, at this stage in his life,
Woody is as racist as you would expect for a
raised by a klansman who lynched people, right like. He
is a very racist little kid, not out of step
with white kids in the area, but not better in
any way certainly. That said, most of his act did
involve fairly safe comedy. Here's one representative example. I stopped

(34:19):
with a family that had two twin boys. One was
named Pete and the other repeat. And at another place
they had two twin girls. One they called Kate and
the other duplicate. Anyway, it's like bits like that, right,
I love repeat. I've heard the Pete and repeat. It's
it's yeah, and they don't do well. Right, This is
he's not he's not like a successful he's not you know,

(34:42):
a breakthrough comedy star. Right. He's also not what you'd
call political at this point. Right, he's not doing talking
about a lot of left wing stuff. Life is too
lean in general for him to have much time for
reading tracts. But he is aware of poverty because it's
the very air he breathed, and he does start tailor
during his jokes to an audience that's in the same

(35:02):
position socioeconomically. Here's one related in the book Ramblin Man.
They have raised the price of meat until it's getting
so a working man can't eat meat. The nearest thing
he can come to eating meat is oxtail soup and
beef tongue. That's the only way he can make both
ends meat get it because it's like from the front
and the back of the animal. Uh huh yeah, yeah,

(35:23):
not a bad little bit. So the Traveling Show is
a catastrophic failure. Though nineteen thirty one and thirty two
are bad years to try and convince people to pay
for amateur entertainment in rural Texas, wood, he did not
need to search hard For an explanation as to why
his life was difficult, he had only to step out
and look at the road each morning, where an endless
stream of climate and economic refugees had begun tramping vaguely

(35:47):
west looking for any hope of survival. He wrote, most
everyone that come had just recently lost everything they had
in the world. The others were fixed and to lose it.
This caused a lot of fights and feuds to break
out between husband and wife and cause sweethearts to haul
off and quit. The crops was all dried up, and
the banks was taken the place. It looked like there
wasn't no hope down here on earth. So you know,

(36:12):
this is the start of the Great Depression. This is
the start of the dust bowl. And for a while,
as he's watching other people's lives fall apart and the
evidence of that, you know, and his life isn't you know,
going to stay together that much longer than this. But
for a while he does have some hope courtesy of
his uncle Jeff, who, after losing his job as a cop,
had also sought work as a faith healer to survive.

(36:35):
And we're going to talk about faith healing, and weirdly enough,
we're going to talk about a book that relates kind
of directly to our immediate future president here. But first,
you know what doesn't relate to the president is these ads.

Speaker 4 (36:50):
I hope not Jesus Christ, I hope fucking not.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
There's a guy when we talk about Donald Trump who's
a big influence on him, Norman Vincent Peel, who was
a big advocate of something called the power of positive thinking. Right,
and this relates to a lot of modern sort of
grift culture. Right. You know, the secret this idea that
if you just start thinking hard enough about the things
that you want, right, just start making affirmations right, that

(37:22):
that will influence reality. Right that like and so as
a result, if you're not getting what you want, if
you're not rich, if you're not successful, it's a failure
of yourself to believe in yourself. Right, You're the only
one you have to blame for not succeeding.

Speaker 6 (37:36):
You know.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
This is the underpinning of the prosperity gospel, This is
the underpinning of MLM culture. Right. And Woody Guthrie at
the start of the Great Depression, through his uncle Jeff,
gets hooked on the very first sort of vector for
this kind of nonsense right in American culture. And it's
through a series of pamphlets, the Secret of the Ages,

(37:58):
published by an America can self help author named Robert
call here right.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
What a good name? Yes, yes, this is Secret of
the Ages is to write things called the Secret of
the Ages and then sell it to gullible people. That's
the Secret to the Ages.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
And that's exactly what Coluer does.

Speaker 6 (38:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
It comes in seven parts. It's a mail order thing,
and it's it's all this kind of shit that's going
to get wrapped up and you know, the power of
positive thinking, prosperity, gospel, MLM, nonsense and kind of modern America.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
And like subscription based services. They were ahead of the curve.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yes, they really are. They would have had pod he
would have been listening to this podcast, right, Collier would
have had a fucking podcast if things had been a
little bit further along right technology wise by this point. Now,
the gist of the message in the Secret of the
Ages is the power of positive thinking. If you just
fix your mind, you can bring yourself abundance and success.

(38:51):
And if you aren't you enjoying success, well, brother, that's
on you. And I'm going to read a quote from
Oh this isn't from the pamphlet that Jeff would have ordered,
but it's from a book that he later makes based
on the pamphlet. All cause is in mind, and mind
is everywhere. All the knowledge there is, all the wisdom
there is, All the power there is is all about you.

(39:11):
No matter where you may be, your mind is part
of it. You have access to it. If you fail
to avail yourself of it, you have no one to
blame but yourself. For as the drop of water in
the ocean shares all the properties of the rest of
the ocean water, so you share in that all power,
all wisdom of mind. If you have been sick and ailing,
if poverty and hardship have been your lot, don't blame

(39:31):
it on fate. Blame yourself. Yours is the earth and
everything that's in it, but you must take it. The
power is there, but you must use it. It is
round about you, like the air you breathe. You don't
expect others to do your breathing for you. Neither can
you expect them to use your mind for you. Universal
intelligence is not only the mind of the creator of
the universe, but it is also the mind of man,

(39:52):
your intelligence, your mind. Let this mind be in you,
which was also in Christ Jesus. So start today by
no that you can do anything you wish to do,
have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish
to be. The rest will follow.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
I love it. It's so politically confused. Are you a
drop in the water or are you completely an individual?
And everything is your fault if you fail? I love it.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Yeah, it's definitely leaning more towards the other side of that.
And Woody early and it's worth noting like he falls
hard for this as a kid, right, Yeah, this is
I think going to be part of why he's a
little bit less vulnerable to this as an adult is
because he kind of gets inoculated by this bullshit with
his uncle.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
You know.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Now, what's remarkable to me about this book, which in
raptures Woody and his uncle as their dreams die around them,
is how similar it reads to a lot of modern
self help clap trap. It's also and this is one
of the weirdest things that I was not expecting to
see as I go through this book. It's focused on
immortality in a way that you could take passages out
of this and put these into like twenty first centuries

(41:00):
Silicon Valley, like fucking Peter Teal shit, and it wouldn't
sound out of place. And I want to read you
a quote from that, because this really does sound like
some shit Peter Teal would have funded. Why is it
that the animals live five to seven times their maturity
when man only lives two to three times his Why
because man hastens decrepitude and decay by holding the thought

(41:21):
of old age always before him. Doctor Alexis Carroll, Nobel
Prize winner and member of the Rockefeller Institute, has demonstrated
that living cells taken from a body properly protected and fed,
can be kept alive, and definitely not only that, but
they grow. In nineteen twelve, he took some tissue from
the heart of an embryo chick and placed it in
a culture medium. It lived and grew for some thirty years,

(41:43):
until they tired of tending it and threw it out.
Doctor Carroll showed a moving picture of these living cells
before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. They grew so
fast they doubled in size every twenty four hours and
had to be trimmed daily. The cells of your being
can be made to live indefinitely when placed out side
your body. Single celled animals never die and natural death.

(42:03):
They live on and on until something kills them. Now
scientists are beginning to wonder if multi cellular man animals
like man really need to die.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
We've come full circle to vampires.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
We come back to vampires. Baby, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Everyone just needs a blood boy.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah, we all do want a blood boy, Margaret, but
for different reasons, you know, for different reasons. I want
a blood boy for purely humanitarian reasons. You know, really,
what's that?

Speaker 4 (42:32):
Yeah, I want to go into that further.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
I like blood and I'm a human.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
Wow, groundbreaking?

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, uh so I do. One of the reasons I
love reading shit like this. And incidentally, folks, one of
the best reasons to read history, even the history of
hokum like this, is because when you're going through, like
if you spend part of your day job looking at
the fucking Network State, Silicon Valley nonsense coming out right
now about how like, oh, you know, Brian Johnson's found

(43:02):
a way to reduce his fucking biological age back down
to eighteen, right, all this shit that people who like
to portray themselves as like geniuses based on the fact
that they have money and are good at finding desperate
people to like market themselves too. It's the same shit
that the same kind of people have been peddling forever, right,
honestly since the days of fucking ancient Egypt.

Speaker 4 (43:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
But like, there a lot of people who think these
folks are intelligent, who think that they're special, who think
that there's something new with our new Silicon Valley overlords, right,
they're just too ignorant to know that these people have
been peddling the same bullshit to hook rubes for a century. Right.
It almost sounds identical. Cool stuff, Yeah, cool, cool, cool,

(43:45):
I love it. So Charlie's new wife, Betty Jean, a nurse,
fell in love with the book as well with coll
Year's book, and she starts faith healing patients that medical
science had failed to save. Everyone agreed she was a
great faith healer and more importantly, she made money with
her magnetic massages. And it's one of those like everyone
talks about what a great faith healer she is and

(44:05):
how even the Richmond come to her for healing, and
then it's like, well, what's her method? Magnetic massages. Okay, yeah, okay,
I think I might know what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Two of the oldest professions are now interacting with each
other again.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Uh yeah, I think I might have an idea as
to why this works.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Curre in male hysteria, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Woody is enthralled enough to start faith healing as well.
Like Betty Jean, he often worked for free, but in
short order he was making more money doing this than
he had at the whiskey store where he'd been working before.
So he decides to go into business himself as a
faith healer with a sign that read faith Healing Mind
Reading no charge, right, and obviously sometimes he gets a charge,

(44:50):
but he's willing to work for free a lot. He's
not like a he really does. I think believe for
a while that he's got some ability to heal people
and ability to read their mind. I don't think he's
a he's a grifter here. I think he's a kid
who's kind of gets really excited by this shit that
has enraptured all of the adults in his life too.
And he's like, well, maybe I'm I've always felt like

(45:10):
I was kind of special. My ability to draw attention
to get people to pay attention to me. Maybe it's
because I've got these magical powers.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
Right, He's more of a busker than a grifter anyway.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
He is a busker, right. And that's the other part
of this.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
When I used to busk all the time for a
little while, we would just go and set up like
a Lucy's Advice stand, and we would just like set up.
We'd build a little thing out of cardboard boxes and
then be like advice one dollar and people would just
come up and ask us for advice. It was really fun.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Yeah, and Woody, that's that's what I get that vibe
from Woody too. He is later in life embarrassed about
this period and he'll start to claim that, like, oh,
I only did like faith healing by accident. I never
wanted to get into the business. Quote, hundreds of people
got my name mixed up with Papa's new wife and
come to my house by mistake. Finally I hung out
a sign telling him to come on in and talk

(45:57):
it over. I decided that faith was the main thing.
But that's not really true. This is Woody massaging his
history again.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
Magnetically, ed Cray found strong evidence to the contrary. In
nineteen thirty five, Woody, who had started a local newspaper
called News Expose, wrote an article announcing that his pseudonym
Alonzo M. Zilch had become a psychological reader. Guthrie advised
readers to take your troubles to Zilch. He's an expert worrier.

(46:26):
The eyes of lots of people are on this man,
for good or bad. So he's writing under his real
name about a psychological reader with a fake name he's
created who is also him.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Oh I love this, I love I identify way harder
with Woody Guthrie than I expected, even though he's been
doing a lot of stuff I don't approve of.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
He's a petty con man and a punk kid, right,
you know, not in a way where I think he's
like a predator.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
But in my first book, I've interviews with these people.
One of them is me under another name, and I
just didn't even tell my publisher. I fucking love you.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, it's it's another good Bastards POD's character who has
a lot of similarities to Margaret Killjoy as a young person.
Uh huh. He was reasonably popular as a faith healer,
which probably owes more to his charisma than psychic powers. Still,
by the time the mid thirties turned to the late thirties,

(47:22):
times were bad enough that Woody had started to wonder
if maybe his future might lay elsewhere. The dust bowl
had kicked off in the early nineteen thirties due to
nearly a decade of drought. It lasted until nineteen thirty nine. Right,
this is like thirty one to thirty nine something like
that is the dust bowl. Like, it's a fucking a
long time that everything is just covered in dust, right,

(47:44):
And it's the result of this, the fact that this
huge number of people had moved to these vast plains
in the American interior and started farming, and they had
over farmed. They had plowed too much of the native grass,
which had like let to this situation where when they
have this drought, things dry out. There's nothing really keeping
the top soil together, and then you get these huge

(48:05):
windstorms which cause these epic apocalyptic waves of dust like
ocean tides to sweep over small towns and blacken the sky. Now,
economic collapse was happening kind of independently but also related
to this. Right, these things feed into each other, even
though they are not like, entirely independent of each other.

(48:26):
Farmers lose their farms, people lose their homes, factories, clothes,
and despair and desperation becomes the normal state of affairs
for everyone in Woody's life. Woody has a front seat
for all of it, writing there on the Texas Plains,
right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with
the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out, and
the hardworking people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness,

(48:48):
worries of every blowing kind. I seen. There was plenty
to make up songs about. Like hundreds of thousands of
Americans trapped in the dust bowl, Woody decided his last
best option was to head west. He became one of
four hundred thousand Americans to make his way to California.
The horror of the situation and his ultimate response to
it contributed to one of his early songs, for which

(49:10):
we have an actual recording and I'm going to play
the whole thing, both because at this point it's clearly
in the public domain, but also wood he had an
understanding of copyright law and refused to copyright things. For
the vast majority of his musical career, and in fact,
here I want to read you. Have you ever read
the copyright notice that Woody Guthrie put in his early
songbooks Magpie. Now this song is copyrighted in US underseal

(49:36):
A copyright number one five four oh eight five for
a period of twenty eight years, and anybody caught singing
it without our permission will be mighty good friends, arn,
because we don't give a durn publish it, write it,
sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it.
That's all we wanted to do.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
What I used to write as the copyright notice in
my early scenes was for those who believe in copyright.
This s his copyright. Everyone else is free.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Yeah, wood he would have liked that. Uh So, anyway,
I'm gonna end this by playing you our first full
Woody Guthrie song, and we'll hear a couple over the
course of these episodes. But here's so long, it's been
good to know you.

Speaker 5 (50:22):
So long. It's been good to know you so long,
been good to know you so long. It's been good
Tony you. This dusty old dust is a flowing me
long I've gotten to be rolling along I'll singing this song,

(50:58):
but I'm sang it in all the place that I
lived on the West Texas Plains, in the city of Tampa,
the county of Gray. Here's why all of the people
are say, well, it's so long. It's been good to

(51:19):
know you so long. It's been good to know you
so long. It's been good to know you. This dusty
old dust is a flowing me home. I've got to
be drifting along anyway. Like I told you, the old

(51:56):
dust storm hit there. These people all congregated in their
little houses, and in the room in the house that
I was in, there was twelve or fifteen people. And
while he was there telling each other, so long, it's
been good to know you, dusty old dust is blowing
me home, and I ain't got long stead gotta be

(52:16):
drifting along. Wow, here's what happened. The telephone ring and
it jumped off the wall. That was the preacher paying
his call. He said, look at the sheep that the

(52:40):
world is in. I've gotta cut price on salvation. And
so long, been good to know you so long. It's
been good to know you. So long. It's been good
to know you. This dusty old dust isn't driving me
whom I've gotta be drifted?

Speaker 3 (53:00):
The long.

Speaker 5 (53:14):
The church houses were jammed and packed, people was sending
from front to the back. It was a.

Speaker 6 (53:24):
Dusty The preacher couldn't read his text, so he folded
his facts and he took up collection, said, so long,
it's been good to.

Speaker 5 (53:36):
Know you so long, been good to know you so long.
It's been good to know you. This dusty, old dust
isn't rolling me. Mold god to be drifting along?

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Ah? Wouldy a good one?

Speaker 4 (53:56):
I like it?

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Hu.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
Also, when you see the photos of him, is there
anyway who saw the video of it? My assumptions are
that man has been in a lot of fights and
he's not particularly good at it, but that has never
stopped him. No, that's my read.

Speaker 4 (54:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
No, that's a guy who does not back down from
many fights and doesn't win any of them.

Speaker 3 (54:18):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
Man, Well, Margaret, you got anything to plug here?

Speaker 5 (54:25):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (54:25):
My most recent book is called The Sapling Cage. It
came out from Feminist Press in October and it is
about a young trans girl who goes off and becomes
a witch and it helps, alongside other people, save the world.
And I have a podcast called cool people that did
cool stuff, which I totally didn't rip off of from
you with the Christmas episodes. Totally not not at all.

(54:47):
It's like Christmas every day over on cool people that
did cool stuff, damn straight and oh if you listen,
it can happen here and or cool people did cool
Stuff Every Sunday. In December twenty twenty four, we're dropping
podcasts from the future thirty years from now, in the
middle of the dinoh War. That's what Cool Zone Media.
We have tapes from the future and we're playing them

(55:08):
all and General Lichtterman is there and something's going on
with Robert but we're not quite sure yet. And you
can hear about the Dino War every Sunday.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Excellent, all right, everybody. That's the episodes well, part one.

Speaker 4 (55:27):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 4 (55:45):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the bastards,