Skip to content
Cover of Dust Bowl Ballads

Album • 2011

Dust Bowl Ballads

Woody Guthrie14 songs • 43 minutes

Dust Bowl Ballads is an album by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. It was released by Victor Records, in 1940. All the songs on the album deal with the Dust Bowl and its effects on the country and its people. It is considered to be one of the first concept albums. It was Guthrie's first commercial recording and the most successful album of his career. Dust Bowl Ballads was originally released as eleven songs on two simultaneously released three-disc set albums of 78 rpm records titled Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1 and Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 2. The twelve sides in total had one song each except for the double-sided "Tom Joad" which was too long to be pressed on a single side of a 78. However, two of the thirteen songs recorded on the sessions, "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues" were left out due to length. All of the tracks were recorded at Victor studios in Camden, New Jersey on April 26, 1940, except "Dust Cain't Kill Me" and "Dust Pneumonia Blues" which were recorded on May 3. In 1950, and in 1964 during the American folk music revival, reissues were released in LP format by Folkways Records after RCA refused Guthrie's request to re-issue the album. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bo...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)

Songs

  1. 1
    The Great Dust Storm ("Dust Storm Disaster")
  2. 2
    Talking Dust Bowl Blues
  3. 3
    Dust Pnemunonia Blues
  4. 4
    Dusty Old Dust ("So Long It's Been Good to Know You")
  5. 5
    Dust Bowl Blues
  6. 6
    Blowing Down This Road ("I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way")
  7. 7
    Tom Joad, Pt. 1
  8. 8
    Tom Joad, Pt. 2
  9. 9
  10. 10
    Dust Bowl Refugee
  11. 11
    I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore
  12. 12
    Vigilante Man
  13. 13
    Dust Can't Kill Me
  14. 14
    Pretty Boy Floyd

Other versions