Beaumont Rag

Allen Ginsberg: How'd you people live out there in Oklahoma? Did you live pretty well?

Woody Guthrie: Well, uh...

AG: Have enough to eat? And a place to sleep? How was it?

WG: I don't know, Allen. To start with, I was a little bit different from... I wasn't in the class that John Steinbeck called the "Okies" because cause my dad, to start with, was worth about thirty-five or forty thousand dollars and he had everything hunky dory. Then he started to have a little bit of bad luck; in fact, our whole family had a little bit of it. I don't know whether it's worth talking about or not. I never do talk it much. But then this six-bedroom house burned down that I told you about, just a day or two after it was built. It was supposed to be one of the biggest, finest in that whole country. Well right after that, my fourteen-year-old sister either set herself afire or caught afire accidentally. There's two different stories got out about it. In a way, she was having a little difficulty with her schoolwork, and she had to stay home and do some work, and she caught afire while she was doing some ironing that afternoon on the old kerosene stove. It was highly unsafe and highly uncertain in them days, and this one blowed up, caught her afire and she run around the house about twice before anybody could catch her. Next day, she died. And my mother, that was a little bit too much for her nerves or something. I don't know exactly how it was. But anyway, my mother died in the insane asylum of Norman, Oklahoma. Then, about that same time, my father mysteriously, for some reason or another, caught afire. There's a lot of people who say he set hisself afire. They say that he caught afire accidentally. I always will think that he done it on purpose because he'd lost all his money, lost his hog ranch. He used to raise some of the best Poland, China, pure-blood hogs in that whole country and had something proud to work for and felt like that he was part of the world and that he was doing some good and working hard and hauling up brothers and sisters. I got another sister and two brothers, and they all felt pretty good until all these things happened and they found theirselves scattered. All us kids had to scatter out and be adopted to different families. I lived with a family of people who was eleven of us. We lived in a little two-room shack. I lived with these people several years. Their name was Sam White and his family and he still lives within about a half a block of the same old house that he lived in in them days. And in the old house with eleven of us sleeping in two rooms, why, we had two or three beds, you know, and so we'd sleep, some of us at the head and some of us at the foot. And had everybody's feet and everybody's faces, you know how that is. Then after that, I don't know. I kinda took to the road. I hit the road one day, the first day that I ever hit the highway, to be what's called a ramblin' man, or a hobo, or a tramp. It was in 1927...

AG: How old were you then?

WG: At that time, I was about seventeen years old

AG: What caused you to leave on that particular day, at that particular time? Do you remember? Or is it something you don't want to talk about?

WG: Well, I was adopted then by another family of people that had a little more money and a little more everything, and was members of the very high and important lodges around over town, and they said it was a pity that so many of us had to live the way we did and not know where our next bite was coming from. So they said that in order to relieve me and the suffering of this family too that I was living with that they'd take me up to their house and I could live with them. So I went up and lived with them, and they had a little old bantam hen. It sat upon that icebox and roosted out there like she owned that whole part of town and my job, mainly, while I was living with that family of people, was to keep track of that cursed bantam hen. I'd have to go find her eggs, where she'd laid the egg, what time of day she'd laid the egg, bring the egg in; I'd sort the egg, lay the egg up, tell the lady about the egg, then go show her the hen, and then she'd go out and pet the hen. And then when night'd come again I'd have to go get the hen again and set her above the icebox to where she could be safe from all harm. And I used to carry her hay fourteen blocks across town from a table in a tall sack. I'd have to make a trip or two every month, by George, to get that hay for the bantam hen. So I thought well, hell's bells, rather than be a chambermaid to a bantam hen, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna take to the highways. So I went to Galveston, Texas. Went down to see the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean and all such stuff as that. And also, I knew some people down there and pulled figs in all them orchards down in that country and helped drill water wells and irrigated strawberries and helped a carpenter down there to tear down a whole bunch of houses and post a bunch of land off. And at that time, I was about eighteen