song – Living Field

The Living Pavilion

Australia. Wild plants. Indigenous knowledge. The Living Pavilion at Melbourne University 2019. The book ‘Plants – past present and future’. Plant blindness – our loss.

Recent travels [1] to see again the River Red Gums, Boxes and Ironbarks and all the other plants around the Murray River in Australia, led first to the Botanic Garden in Sydney [2] where among hundreds of species grew the grass tree Xanthorrhoea, famous for its gum but having many other uses, and the hairpin banksia Banksia spinulosa in full flower.

This Banksia, native to eastern coasts, was given its Latin name after botanist Josef Banks, who travelled with James Cook in the late 1760s, but the continent’s many Banksia’s – like many other Australian plants – had been known, named and used for tens of thousands of years before then.

Which thoughts were present on seeing a series of books on Indigenous knowledge [3] at the Garden’s shop. And reading one named Plants – past, present and future [4] was a revelation.

Plants by Cumpston, Fletcher and Head (2022) introduces many of the species that have sustained people in Australia, and makes the case for returning to these well-adapted forms as climate, habitat loss and soil degradation expose the limitations of some current agricultural practices. That’s for another article ….. but finding more about Plants led to the web presence and reports on Melbourne University’s Living Pavilion.

Living Pavilion 2019

The Living Pavilion [5] was an exhibition and centre of learning built in 2019 as a space, primarily occupied of plants, in which people could walk, see, touch, smell and wonder. It was part of CLIMARTE’s ‘ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE’ festival, 1-17 May 2019 [6]. Here’s an extract from page 9 of the the Living Pavilion report [5]:

“The landscape design transformed a seemingly unspectacular part of the campus into a haven of biodiversity and Indigenous stories through the installation of over 40,000 Kulin Nation plants, artworks, gathering spaces and soundscapes. It brought together Indigenous knowledge systems, community arts, performance, music, sustainable design and ecological science to showcase how transdisciplinary initiatives can sow the seeds of community vitalisation and environmental stewardship.”

The plants were the central feature of the Pavilion, assembled in a way that people could walk and sit among them, see, touch and smell them. Descriptive signage explained how Indigenous communities cultured plants in agriculture and aquaculture and derived many useful products from them [7]. A range of edible and medicinal plants, grown in an Indigenous Community Garden, taught the value of plants not only to people but to the wider ecosystem, including insects and other invertebrates.

For amphibian lovers, there was the Frog Fest including the Frog Soundscape which produced calls from a range of frog species in a re-creation of a waterway – the Bouverie Creek – which the university built over but which continues to flow beneath it. And there was more at the Frog Fest in the way of activities for children, like dressing as frogs, face painting and making frog life-stages in clay.

Art, craft, song and dance

Art and music was inseparable from the plants and their uses. Spaces were allocated to craftwork, singing, dance, art installations, demonstrations and soundscapes.

Artists and craftworkers taught the utility of native plants using traditional techniques. Stephanie Beaupark showed how fibres and dyes from native plants are used in weaving; while Katie West recreated a fishing net using materials and methods that few now know about [8].

Song and dance enlivened the festival, including performances from the Djirri Djirri Dance Group, The Orbweavers and The Merindas. You can get a feel for what it must have been like by visiting the performers’ web sites [8].

What resonates with the Living here is the belief that human society and culture are “an inherent and inseparable part of ecosystems”. The Living Pavilion’s logo, which can be seen on the web page is described: “The circle in the middle represents a meeting space. The water represents the creek that once flowed through the space and signifies journey and life. The plants represent flora and fauna and connection to Country and place.”

The Living Pavilion was the seventh in a series of events under the collective name The Living Stage developed during a PhD at Melbourne University by Tanja Beer. This bringing-together of people and culture with ecosystems and artistic performance continues through the project Ecoscenography – adventures in a new paradigm for performance making [9].

First knowledges book series

The book referred to above, Plants – Past, Present and Future by Zena Cumpston, Michael-Shawn Fletcher and Lesley Head, is one in a series titled First Knowledges edited by Margo Neale [3].

Another in the series is on land use and management, titled Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe. Here’s an extract from the publisher’s web: (the authors) ‘demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not solely hunters and gatherers, the First Australians also farmed and stored food.’

An important theme in these books is that agriculture began tens of thousands of years before modern wheat, rice, maize and the other main cereals were domesticated from wild grasses. Similarly, systematic methods of land management were in place, for example to reduce the ‘killer fires’ that have caused so much destruction in recent years.

Lessons for the Atlantic zone croplands

There is much for us to learn from these books. Little is known of plants and land use in northern Britain and Ireland before to the retreat of the last ice 10,000-12,000 years ago. Modern crops have been grown here for only half that time, but before their arrival, and until recent centuries, people used wild plants for food, medicine, dyes, clothing and building.

Knowledge has been retained in written records, including accounts originating during the monastic expansion from Europe [10] and in more recent herbals [11].

Yet while some specialists are re-learning and extending plant knowledge today, the broader existence and utility of plants is unknown to most people [12]. It’s not just the knowledge that is fading – the plants themselves have also been made rare or extinguished. The recent Plant Atlas 2020 by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland [13] shows loss and extinction are continuing.

One of the main aims of the Living Field has been to show people the wealth of plant life in our region, especially the older crop species and varieties that are no longer grown and the many native plants and long-term introductions that have been used in various ways since the retreat of the ice. We will continue with that work.

The Living Field here could also learn from the Living Pavilion in Melbourne. We could bring in far more plant species and varieties for people to learn about. We could restore forgotten uses of our native and introduced species and link them to our cultures and places. And perhaps more than anything, we can feel we are not alone in the restoration of our botanical diversity – people throughout the world are doing the same.

There are organisations in the UK to help if you want to know more about plants and get involved in their conservation [14]

Sources | links

[1] The editor writes of a visit in March 2023 to Australia.

[2] Royal Botanic Garden Sydney: https://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au /

[3] First Knowledges series edited by Margo Neal. For details on all books in the series: Thames and Hudson Australia web site.

[4] Cumpston Z, Fletcher, M-S, Head L. (2022) Plants – past, present and future. Thames and Hudson Australia, 212 pages.

[5] Living Pavilion at the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub where a substantial report on the project can be downloaded (cover shown above). Citation: Beer, T., Hernandez-Santin, C., Cumpston, Z., Khan, R., Mata, L., Parris, K., Renowden, C., Iampolski, R., Hes, D. and Vogel, B. (2019). The Living Pavilion Research Report. The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The web link left describes how this image is made from weather data.

[6] CLIMARTE an Australian charity founded 2010 ’harnesses the creative power of the arts to inform, engage, and inspire action on the climate crisis’. Web site: https://climarte.org/ The group’s ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2019 Festival ‘presented 33 socially engaged exhibitions and events … across Melbourne and regional Victoria’. The Living Pavilion was one of them. Festival web site: climarte.org/project/artclimatechange -2019 where there are links to the full programme, podcasts and other resources.

[7] Cumpston, Z. (2020). Indigenous plant use: A booklet on the medicinal, nutritional and technological use of indigenous plants. Downloadable at Living Pavilion web page at Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub [cover shown right, see also 5].

[8] Performing at the Living Pavilion 2019 – some current web links : artists in residence Stephanie Beaupark and Katie West || Singing and dancing from Djirri Djirri – Wurundjeri Women’s Dance group || The Orbweavers – their song Reeds Rush links several features of the Living Pavilion || and The Merindas.

[9] Ecoscenography by Tanja Beer: blog, reading group, articles and artworks, ecological design for performance.

[10] Living Field articles on the uses of medicinal plants and the transmission of plant lore at religious sites: Medicinals through the Ages 1; Medicinal Forage – Kinloss Abbey; Labours of the Months – the Easby Murals

[11] Modern herbals and books and plant lore are listed at the end of the Living Field’s Garden/Medicinals page.

[12] Plant Blindness – a human inability to see plants, differentiate between them, understand what they do, accept them as the basis of animal and human life. More at Wikipedia including pointers to research and teaching material e.g., Wandersee, J. H., & Schussler, E. E. (1999). Preventing plant blindness. The American Biology Teacher, 61, 82–86.

[13] The recently published Plant Atlas 2020 by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland details the serious declines in native plants and plants introduced in the distant past, contrasting with the spread of recent introductions. See the Living Field’s notes on the latest and previous atlases at BSBI Plant Atlas 2020.

[14] Want to get involved with plants? In the UK, find out more through the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland and Plantlife – both organisations promote plants through learning, training, meetings and visits, and welcome plant enthusiasts from absolute beginners to experts.

All among the barley

By Russ Clare

Being the first part of an article by singer and musician Russ Clare on a song about grain crops and their importance in the folk tradition.

History of a song

The corpus of rural England’s traditional balladry is admired for its engaging stories from the past still relevant today, and beautiful melodies often with a quirkiness towards time signature and modality. It’s a treasure-trove for singers. One such that I love to sing is All among the barley, also commonly known as The Ripe and Bearded Barley:

Come out, it's now September, the Hunters' moon's begun
And through the wheaten stubble is heard the frequent gun
The leaves are turning yellow, and fading into red
While the ripe and bearded barley is hanging down his head

Chorus: All among the barley, who would not be blythe? When the ripe and bearded barley is smiling on the scythe

The wheat is like a rich man, he's sleek and well-to-do
The oats are like the young girls, they're thin and dancing too
The rye is like a miser, all sulky, lean and small
While the ripe and bearded barley is the monarch of them all

The Spring is like a fair maid that does not know her mind
The Summer is a tyrant of most ungrateful kind
But the Autumn is an old friend who pleases all she can
Brings the ripe and bearded barley to gladden the hearts of man

I came across this little folk song gem in 1974 while browsing a poetry anthology in a Nottingham school library. My attention was captured by its portrayal of the changing seasons, setting the scene for a playful imagination of cereal crops and with special praise for barley, the brewers and distillers source of alcohol. I fondly imagined the song to have had a life in the past among the country people of rural Leicestershire, where I was living at the time. A likely favourite at harvest homes, those end of harvest celebrations of feasting, drinking, and singing. While All among the barley deserved a place in my growing repertoire for singing in folk song clubs, in this case no tune was given, merely a credit to Folk Songs of the Upper Thames. I had been unaware of the collection, and in those pre-internet times further enquiry soon came to a halt. So the hunt was on for a suitable melody.

The search ended with a dance tune, The Tip Top Polka, a personal ‘ear worm’ from listening to the brass band accompaniment for the Britannia Coconut Dancers on their Easter Saturday procession around Bacup, their home town in Lancashire. My mind attached All among the barley‘s words to the melody. It seemed a near perfect fit, and I have stuck with it ever-since, giving the song an airing each Autumn. Listen to a recording here.

All Among the Barley – a novel by Melissa Harrison

It’s likely I had the song in mind when, in September 2018, I noticed an intriguing newspaper review of All Among the Barley, a novel by Melissa Harrison. It is set in Suffolk in the 1930s, where local fourteen year old Edie meets Constance, a London writer on a mission (ostensibly) to chronicle the traditions of an isolated rural community challenged by modernity.

Harrison has garnered much critical acclaim for her evocation of a way of life in decline – the closeness and beauty of nature, more bountiful and diverse than now; age-old patterns of work driven by the seasons; the tension created from clinging to the familiar while recognising the need to embrace innovation. In a closing scene, following the story’s tragic conclusion, Edie’s grandfather sings to her. She is comforted by his songs, recognising the continuity they represent in the history of her family and home; songs passed down the generations.

In fiction, Edie heard her grandfather sing All Among the Barley. But the song has a real-life story of its own, about its origin and popularity, and its telling needs first a consideration of the nature of traditional folk song.

The song collectors

We will be forever in debt to Victorian and Edwardian song collectors for their rescue of so much of our traditional folk heritage, seemingly heading for extinction as singers aged and their art succumbed to rural depopulation, urbanisation and popular entertainment in the music halls. Between 1890 and 1920, Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frank Kidson, and Percy Grainger, notable among others, wrote down thousands of song lyrics and tunes from country people, travelling widely, often by bicycle, in their search for singers. Sharp, in particular, was driven by an ideological attempt to use folk song as a resource to establish a National music with an identifiable English style; Vaughan Williams, though less ideological was arguably more successful in that pursuit.

In his essay, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (1907), Sharp promoted the idea of anonymous community authorship of songs and their subsequent adaptation as they were passed around and down generations in a purely oral manner. It is unlikely, however, an oral tradition can survive exclusively alongside written communication – a degree of coexistence is more likely.

A community’s songs must be either composed from within, learned by listening to other singers or obtained from printed sources: the relative importance of these routes is keenly debated. Songs on commercially produced broadsides and chapbooks – written by artisan scribes or purloined from other sources – were commonly sold on the street from the 16^th century. They were very popular, for it is a myth, although a popular notion, that illiteracy among the rural working class was widespread before 1700 and beyond. The work of folk song scholar, Steve Gardham, does support the idea that many songs, if not most, entered the tradition from these written sources. His analysis of 705 songs found in oral tradition in England between 1840 and 1940 showed 88% had their earliest extant version in some form of urban commercial production (Traditional Song Forum online address September 2020, from 47:50). It is, however, widely accepted, as Sharp first suggested, an oral process that turns a song from whatever source into a traditional folk song. Shared in a community by listening and learning, songs have been adapted and shaped by singers’ inherent creative talent and passed on to succeeding generations, thus accounting for the rich lyrical and musical variation found by collectors.

Origins of a song

So what of the origins and traditional status of All Among the Barley?

The earliest record of it is a composition by Elizabeth Stirling, published in 1851 as a four part (SATB) choral arrangement in Novello’s Part Song Book. Stirling (1819 – 1895), a career church organist and composer who studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, enigmatically credits the lyrics to A T who has never been identified. Speculation among music scholars that it might be Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) is not backed by hard evidence, but they were contemporaries and both living in London in the 1840s, so a song writing partnership is not inconceivable. Moreover, in the opening verses of the The Lady of Shalott (1832), there is some resonance with All Among the Barley‘s lyrics:

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye...
	.......
	
Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early....

An indication of a common author, or mere coincidence?

A song spreads far and wide

A judging panel of Novella’s collection awarded 2^nd prize to All Among the Barley, and, among Stirling’s various organ compositions and song arrangements, it was, and remains Stirling’s most popular work, for which the sheet music is still available. It soon became a frequent choice for amateur choirs, as in the inaugural concert of Weymouth Choral Society on February 26th, 1862, and a concert given by Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) Glee and Madrigal Club on 17 March 1879.

Writing in English Dance and Song magazine in 1967, Tony Wales cites several sources indicating the song’s popularity in schools well into the 20^th Century. All Among the Barley soon found its way to publishers of songbooks such as The Fashionable Songbook (Routledge, 1865) and of broadsides across the country, including J Harkness of Preston in (1874) among many.

Stirling’s song also became popular in the USA; the Library of Congress records an arrangement in three parts for women’s voices (Lee & Walker, Philadelphia, 1871), and a version with a message from the Women’s Temperance Society in Living Waters—A Collection of Popular Temperance Songs, Choruses, Quartets (Peters, J. L., New York, 1874):

All among the Barley, wander you and I 
Tho' we love the smiling Barley, we shun the dreadful Rye
Tho' we love the happy Barley, we shun the dreadful Rye

It was also included in resources for schools, as in The Golden Robin (W.O. Perkins, Boston 1863).

A popular song in print, then, and the work of a musician and, perhaps, a lyricist too, who were some steps removed from its bucolic setting. Instances of the song in oral tradition are surprisingly sparse, however. Among a plethora of printed sources, Steve Roud’s eponymous Folk Song Index cites All Among the Barley for nine singers, eight with records made between 1914 and 1974 (a ninth is undated). So, an enduring circulation among country singers in 20^th Century England is suggested, and all evidence is consistent with All Among the Barley entering the tradition from written sources traceable to Sterling’s original score.

One song collector and one singer deserve more attention

Alfred Williams (1877 – 1930) collected folk songs from the Upper Thames Valley in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire. In contrast to Sharp and other materially comfortable, middle class collectors, Williams was born into working class poverty – in the village of South Marston, near Swindon. He was a half-time farmhand at eight, full-time by eleven, and a Swindon railway factory worker for 23 years. Williams was, nevertheless, an effective autodidact. Rising early to work before a factory shift and resuming late into the night, he published several volumes of poetry and social history, drawing on a love for his native Wiltshire countryside, and a commitment to recording the local people’s way of life. Along the way he found time to learn several languages, including French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. His most enduring work, Life in a Railway Factory documented the drudgery that led to his health break down and reliance on writing for a living.

Between 1914 and 1916, Williams cycled thousands of miles collecting the words of nearly 800 songs; a selection of some 200 were published as Folk Songs of the Upper Thames in 1923 “The greater part of the work of collecting the songs must be done at night, and winter is the best time, as the men are then free from their labours after tea.” On one such cold, night time journey Williams collected The Ripe and Bearded Barley from Henry Sirman, a farm hand of Stanton Harcourt. Williams lacked the skills to note down tunes, but the songs’musicality was not his prime concern; he was more interested in the significance of the songs in the lives of his informants. His own life was tragically short, worn down by poverty and a punishing work schedule.

To its considerable surprise and delight, the folk music scene of the 1970s discovered a traditional singer living, and hiding in plain sight, in Norfolk. Walter Pardon (1914 – 1996), a carpenter, passed his entire life, apart from four years war service at Aldershot, in the village of Knapton. He had a repertoire of around 150 songs, mainly learned by listening to family members. As a younger man there were few opportunities for social singing or public performance so he sang for his own entertainment, continuing in the isolation of the family cottage long after both parents had died.

Walter’s cousin Roger Dixon, a history teacher, aware of the interest Walter’s singing would arouse, recorded 20 songs and passed the tape to professional folk singer, Peter Bellmay. A late flowering singing career followed for Walter, who performed at clubs and festivals, recorded several CD albums, and sang in Washington at the USA’s 1976 bi-centennial celebrations, before retirement at 75 in 1989. His repertoire is notable for having several exclusive or rarely collected songs, including All Among the Barley. Sung to an approximation of Stirling’s tune, it can be found on Walter’s CD Put a bit of Powder on it, Father and in The British Library Sound Archive.

All Among the Barley has retained its appeal. In the 1980s Cheltenham singers, Mike and Jackie Gabriel, had the lyrics but no tune so composed their own. Robust, invitingly singable, and very much in an English traditional style, it has become, almost, the exclusive melody of choice for today’s singers. Several interpretations can be found on Youtube and variation in words and music shows the ‘folk process’ still at work.

The second part of Russ Clare’s article Social and environmental changes during the life of a song will be published later on this web site.

Contact: http://www.russclare.com/

Ed: many thanks to Russ for this contribution on the enduring presence of grain crops in folk traditions.

Cornbread peas and black molasses

During his session at the Dundee Jazz Festival, at the Frigate Unicorn on 18 November, Mike Whellans performed the blues classic Cornbread, peas and black molasses. Memories…

Made popular in folk and blues clubs this side of the Atlantic by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, it was a work song – forced work – a complaint on a monotonous diet. The song leads back to a dark history, but also to an enlightened discovery of the cause of a serious dietary deficiency that was thought to be an infectious disease.

The constituents

Cornbread is made from maize flour (maize is corn in the Americas) and black molasses from cane sugar (known as black treacle here). So that’s two members of the grass family, originally accompanied by fatty preserved meat, constituting the food of slaves, chain gangs and many rural poor. In fact, the words go Cornbread meat and black molasses in some versions of the song.

Not a healthy diet therefore and the cause of the disease pellagra, a deficiency in the vitamin niacin (B3 or nicotinic acid). Symptoms include sores covering large areas of the skin, vomiting, diarrhoea and eventually dementia.

At some point ‘peas’ entered the title, but they would probably have made little difference to the prevalence of the disease unless they were fresh.

Pellagra and niacin deficiency

The discovery by Joseph Goldberger in the USA that pellagra was a vitamin deficiency was a victory for logic and experiment over presumption and superstition. (See the links below under Sources.)

So where does the vitamin niacin come from. It is made in plants. They take up minerals from the soil and with the products of photosynthesis, make, for their own purposes, what we know as vitamins.

The deficiency has been associated with areas that consume maize (or sorghum) as the main staple carbohydrate, notably in the south of the USA, but including parts of southern Europe in the 1700s. Maize contains niacin, but not in a form readily available to humans.

A note on the Linus Pauling Institute’s page on niacin reads: “Interestingly, pellagra was not known in Mexico, where corn was also an important dietary staple and much of the population was also poor. In fact, corn contains appreciable amounts of niacin, but it is present in a bound form that is not nutritionally available to humans. The traditional preparation of corn tortillas in Mexico involved soaking the corn in a lime (calcium oxide) solution, prior to cooking. Heating the corn in an alkaline solution results in the release of bound niacin, increasing its bioavailability.’

Foods rich in niacin include pulses such as peas and groundnut (peanut), some fresh fish and meat, wheat bread, green leafy vegetables and fruits; and it’s this sort of food that the poor or enslaved pellagra victims did not get.

Sources

Pellagra and niacin

Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University: Niacin
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/niacin

Poverty, slavery and the discovery of dietary deficiency

Middleton J. 2008. Pellagra and the blues song ‘Cornbread, meat and black molasses’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 101, 569-570. Also Middleton J. 1999. The blues and pellagra: a public health detective story. BMJ 319, 7218.

National Institute of Health Office of History (USA) Dr Joseph Goldberger & the war on pellagra.

US Slave blogspot http://usslave.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/slave-diet-low-in-niacin-causes.html (Note: includes images of people afflicted by the disease)

Singers and songs

Mike Whellans web site: http://mikewhellans.co.uk/biography.htm

The Mudcat Cafe (discussion forum on trad songs): Cornbread peas and black molasses.

Worksongs.org http://www.worksongs.org/blog/2013/01/25/cornbread-and-peas-black-molasses

See Worksongs.org link above or search U-tube for the song title + Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee, Johnny Silvo or Mike Whellans.

Links to other livingfield pages that touch on slavery: Empire at Wall projects II Montrose; It was slavery days.

Ed: first heard Cornbread peas and black molasses sung by Johnny Silvo quite some time ago, but no idea at the time what cornbread and molasses were. Good, also, to listen to Mike Whellans again. He played for a time with Ali Bain on fiddle, touring the folk clubs in the 1980s; never forget their versions of Sweet Georgia Brown and Jimmy Clay (on a vinyl LP called Ali Bain – Mike Whellans).

Great venue, the Frigate Unicorn – an upper room stretches almost the whole length of the ship.

Contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

Dust bowl ballads

“On the 14th day of April / Of 1935, there struck / The worst of dust storms / That ever filled the sky. “

Reports suggesting the infamous 1930s north american dust bowl could happen again have been circulating in recent years (links below). Recent analysis suggests that it could be worse this time due to higher temperatures! … on which more to follow.

The singer Woody Guthrie had first hand experience of the dust and its destruction of the means to produce food and earn a living.

Science argued then that the dust bowl was of man’s own making. True to form, the record label Folkways did not shy away from the environmental and political.

Dust bowl ballads by Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie wrote a set of songs on life in the US dust bowl. His performances were published by Folkways Records as a vinyl long-playing record (LP).

The record cover (right, scanned from editor’s own copy) is a photograph of a group of three people, a man and two children, walking past a shack and posts that are being buried in dust. Not credited on the LP, but by Arthur Rothstein, taken 1936, it is one of many images commissioned to record the story of the dust bowl.

Guthrie and Folkways included a paper insert of comments by the performer, the words of the songs, some further images and an extract from a book The Story of Plants by John Asch published in 1948.

Woody Guthrie’s notes were dated ‘later days of May, 1950’. He writes: “I just beat my way from NYC to L.A. and then back home again to Coney Island.”

“I rolled a ways with experts of every kind. I stood a while, I rode a while, I talked a mite with young and old weather birds, about too much or not enough water, too much wind or not enough wind, too much mud or not enough mud, too much work or not enough work, too much money or not enough money, too much of everything and not enough of nothing. ”

“I heard folks talk and cry about the dust storms all out across our 16 middlewest states. I saw that lost gone look on their faces when they told me the government didn’t follow the plan of FDR and so our land is still a dustbowl hit by dust-storms and the duststorms are getting higher and wilder and meaner, and the hearts of the people are sickly worried.

“No job, low pay, high prices, higher taxes, bum houses, slummy houses. Great diseases are running and great sores are spreading down across our map and the duststorms and the cyclone and the dirty winds and the twisters ride high and wide, low across our whole land. Government experts tell me these dusters will get a lot worse.”

“The old dustbowl is still there, and that high dirt-wind is still there. the government didn’t fix that and the Congress couldn’t put a stop to it. Nobody tried very hard.”

[FDR is Franklin D Roosevelt who not long into his presidency initiated a plan for rehabilitation of the dust bowl lands.]

Notes on soil erosion by John Asch

The insert had this extract on soil erosion from a book The Story of Plants by John Asch published 1948.

Sources, references, links

Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie was originally published by Folkways Records, Album No FH5212, 1964. Reissued as a CD and download, and available from Smithsonian Folkways http://www.folkways.si.edu.

John Asch. 1948. The story of plants. Illustrated by Tabea Hofmann. Publisher: Putnam’s Sons, 407 pages or thereabouts.

Images reproduced here are scanned directly from an LP bought and owned by GS.

“My good gal sings the dust pneumonee blues / my good gal sings the dust pneumonee blues / she loves me cos she’s got the dust pneumonee too.”

Further

Nature Conservancy (US based) article When the dust settled with images and slideshow of the dustbowl, opening with some of Woody Guthrie’s best lines.

The Dust Bowl – a film by Ken Burns: highly informative web site – perhaps begin with Photo gallery and Legacy.

Steinbeck J. 1939. The grapes of wrath. (A novel about a family’s experiences and losses in the dust bowl.

Bennett HH, Chapline WR. 1928. Soil erosion a national menace. Circular No. 33, United States Department of Agriculture. [A technical article warning on erosion in the USA before the main dust bowl years. Available online as a downloadable pdf: search ‘Bennett’ + ‘soil erosion’ + ‘1928’]

Hugh Hammond Bennett and the Creation of the Soil Erosion Service at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Examples of recent reports of a new dust bowl

Smithsonion.com: Are we headed for another dust bowl?

National Geographic: Parched: a new dust bowl forms in the heartland

Yale Climate Connections: Avoiding a second dust bowl across the UK.

Author/contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk