The storm had its origins in the Dakotas where a high pressure system was challenged by a hard-charging cold front from Yukon country. The wind howled like a hammer and picked up tons of Dakota dirt and propelled it southward, where many more tons of dirt, exposed by the plow to the wind, was waiting to be likewise carried away to the south, toward Oklahoma and Texas.
In retrospect, a frustrating irony of that day for the people on the great Southern Plains was how the day started off like a picture from one of the newspaper and magazine advertisements for the region that drew many of the people to the plains in the first place. That was back in the days when the rains came and the grass grew to fruitful maturity before it was all plowed up and given over to crops. On that beautiful spring morning, April 14, 1935, people who had endured so much might have thought the worst was over, but it was more like being in the eye of a hurricane.
Dust storms were nothing new to the region. The region had been blasted by wind and dirt for five years, and the people who were still hanging on at that point were in the minority. Most who had settled the region during wetter years were gone now to California and other climates judged to be friendlier than the wind- and dust-ravaged Great Plains. Collectively, the hard-scrabble Dust Bowl refugees were referred to as Okies and were immortalized in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." And in Woody Guthrie's music.
Guthrie had moved with his father to Pampa from Oklahoma six years previous, after his mother was institutionalized. Woody dropped out of Pampa High School, but was a voracious reader of everything from the classics to philosophy. An uncle taught him how to play guitar while worked at Harris Drug Store in Pampa as a soda jerk. From time to time ,Woody started making up tunes to go with his poetry. Some of the tunes and lyrics were pretty good.
On that April day that started off so bright and turned so dark so suddenly, Woody Guthrie and some friends huddled in a room around a single light bulb with only faint wisp of light penetrating the dust. It was, Guthrie thought, like the Red Sea closing in on the Israelites.
"This is it," one of the people in the room with Guthrie said. "The end of the world."
Of all the storms that hammered the plains in the 1930s, the one that swept down from the Dakotas that day was the worst of them all. More than 300,000 tons of topsoil was removed and whipped into a rolling cloud of dust that turned night into day, turned an idyllic Sunday morning in April into something that made even these hard veterans of the storms think the end of the world had indeed come. News accounts of the storm gave the time and place its enduring name: the Dust Bowl.
As Pampa descended into the choking, dusty darkness of Black Sunday, Guthrie started humming a tune about leaving these hard times behind. "Dusty Old Dust (So Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh)" came from that storm. It's one of Woody Guthrie's best-known songs, perhaps second only to "This Land is Your Land."
The song was prophetic because Woody Guthrie eventually joined that line of refugees escaping the plains with little more than the clothes they wore. He did some hard traveling and wrote songs by the thousands, eventually earning a recording contract and a large measure of commercial success. But, he never forgot that he had been of those Dust Bowl refugees, and the experience figured one way or another into many of his best-known songs.
Others have told and written about the Dust Bowl over the years, but Woody Guthrie was the one who gave it a soundtrack.
