Texas Oil Field

Allen Ginsberg: Well Woody, did you begin to sing about this time or how did that happen?

Woody Guthrie: Well, when I'd come back from this trip to the Gulf of Mexico that I told you about, then I went back up into the pan handle of Texas, the big wheat belt. Up around Amarillo, Texas---north of Amarillo, Texas. And I found Borger and Canadian and Pampa and all those old fields up in there. Big oil fields that had just broke out, and there was a big boom on, and a lot of people from down in my country was going down there to get a job of work. And times had gotten pretty hard in Oklahoma and everybody was drifting out that way so I drifted out there with 'em. And when I got out into that country, I got a job about the third day I was there. I got a job with a feller who owned a root beer stand, supposedly. And he said he'd give me three dollars a day to stay behind the counter and sell people root beer. So I told him I had intelligence enough to do that, so I got around behind the counter and he told me, he said now in addition to this root beer, he said here's some bottles here of another description, he said if anybody comes up and lays a dollar and a half on the counter here, why you reach down, gently and firmly, and let 'em have one of these here bottles. One day my curiosity got the best of me, and I just got to wondering what the devil was in them bottles, so I opened up one and tasted of it, and it was nothing in the world but just pure, old, unadulterated corn whiskey. So we was wheelin'-and-a-dealin' there in the whiskey business for a long time. And this guy had a guitar that laid around there, and a lot of time there wouldn't be any customers around in the place so I'd grab up this guitar and got to pecking around on it. I thought it sounded awful pretty. And I learnt a little old chord, just how to bear the chord long, and I may've learnt a few little old songs, and I don't know what just kind of drifted into it. I never did own a guitar, though, for---

AG: What were some of the first songs you began to sing out there in the pan handle?

WG: Here's an old song here that they sing back down in that country. Almost everybody knows it. The name of this one here is...