The genesis and persistence of Tom Joad in American protest music

In 1995, Bruce Springsteen penned a song called “The Ghost of Tom Joad”, which appeared on the album of the same name. Although not commercially successful, the significance of this track is its reference to John Steinbeck’s character in the book, The Grapes of Wrath. Springsteen tapped into the mythical image of Tom Joad as a working-class hero of the people, in order to create a voice that his audience could identify with. This tradition began in the thirties with Woody Guthrie and has continued to appear in American protest music ever since.

In 1940, an Oklahoma musician known as Woody Guthrie recorded the Dust Bowl Ballads, a collection of songs that talked about the hardships of The Great Depression through the eyes of evicted sharecroppers from America’s Midwest, known as ‘Okies’. Inspired by Steinbeck’s novel, and later John Ford’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, Guthrie’s music became popular not only amongst the migrant farmers who were looking for a voice in an unfamiliar California, but also among others who sympathised with his leftist ideology and use of folk music as a rallying cry to the people to effect a change in their society. The messages in Guthrie’s songs led to the growth of ‘protest music’ in America, a tradition that is still popular today. Artists such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen have used figures like Tom Joad, as well as other similar characters, in their songs in order to create a familiar voice with which their audience can identify. Even as the emergence of rock music overshadowed folk as the traditional protest genre (and later, hip hop), the mythical figure of Tom Joad as a working-class hero still lives on today.

In the 1930s a small percentage of tenant farmers working on the land in Oklahoma and some of the surrounding states were finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet due to several seasons of bad harvest. Along with new government subsidies for farm owners, allowing them to purchase tractors and other agricultural equipment, some tenant farmers found themselves out of work, and migrated to California to make a better living there. John Steinbeck, a journalist at the time, took this story and embellished it in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The book became so popular that the lasting legacy of the Okie migration in the public memory is in fact the book’s version of reality, and not necessarily the real story.

In Steinbeck’s version, dust storms and bank closures cause the farm owners to evict the tenant farmers off the land with little warning. They knock down their houses and force them to leave. Entire families of tenant farmers all across the “Dust Bowl” left for California in droves, scraping together what little money they had to buy a car for the weeks-long journey. When they got to California, they faced extreme poverty, police brutality, and yet more hardship, and the book ends on a gloomy note. Steinbeck exemplified the experiences of the Okies into one family — the Joads. Originally setting off as an entire extended family, they suffer the deaths of Grandma and Grandpa, and it is clear by the end of the novel that Tom Joad, the eldest son, has become the head of the family and a hero of the people. Tom Joad is a young, strong, hardworking man who is willing to stand up to authority and be the champion of the working-class, and Steinbeck suggests that even after death he will be there when he is needed by the people: “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there”.

Woody Guthrie shared a similar philosophy to John Steinbeck, whose Marxist ideology is apparent throughout the novel. It was the idea of these downtrodden folk uniting in their numbers to bring about a proletarian revolution that first caught Guthrie’s attention. The Grapes of Wrath received huge interest and was quickly followed by a film adaptation by John Ford. The literary hero, Tom Joad, became a celebrated figure, and Steinbeck’s audience bought in to the Okie myth he had created.

It was upon this myth that Woody Guthrie first built his music. As a native Oklahoman, he aligned himself with Steinbeck’s vision of the migrant experience. He recorded thirteen songs all relating to the Okie migration and the Dust Bowl, and his lyrics talked about missing home, as well as trying to settle in and survive in California, as can be heard in songs like “Do Re Mi”. The songs were popular among the migrants, as they easily identified with the meanings and ideas contained within the music. Indeed, it was the Okie image that Guthrie created in his songs more than the actual realities of migrant life that people associated with, and it was through the music’s ability to create a common denominator that the Okie identity was formed.

However, the songs were more than just reminiscences of the “good ol’ days”. Folk music addressed the discrimination and oppression that the people faced and turned it into a political message. Indeed Guthrie saw the purpose of folk songs as political, and a chance to express the demand for rights. As Associate Professor at Louisiana State University, Charles Shindo argues: “Just as [Dorothy] Lange placed the migrants in a universal context, and Steinbeck placed them in a philosophical context, and Ford placed them in a mythic populist context, Guthrie included the migrants on the side of the have-nots in a highly politicised context”. It was this role as “political educator” which made Guthrie a celebrated musician years after his death.

In a direct reference to John Steinbeck’s novel, Guthrie recorded the song “Tom Joad” in which he traces the narrative of the main character as well as Preacher Casey, and paraphrases Tom famous speech:

Wherever little children are hungry and cry
Wherever people ain’t free…
That’s where I’m a-gonna be

This song, Shindo argues, “illustrates the way in which Guthrie combined the traditional values of morality, family, and religion with the idea of collective action and civil rights”.

A resurgence of the Okie myth came years later in 1969 when Merle Haggard recorded “Okie from Muskogee”. Staying within the country-folk genre, this song celebrated the heritage of the children of the Okie migrants, and proved to be one of the best-selling country songs of 1969. While Haggard was reviving a particular subject with this and his other Dust Bowl ballads, he was just one of many other musicians who were reviving the folk tradition in music at the time. According to University of Washington’s Professor James Gregory, it had in fact “been changing during the decades, finding a new niche and new audiences, and adjusting some of its representations accordingly”. The identifying quality in this kind of music had now “shifted from region to class”, and in doing so encompassed a wider audience of blue-collar, working class, white Americans. Thus folk music’s ability to provide a voice for the disenfranchised meant that it could now be used to tell other stories, as seen in the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Although not directly referencing Tom Joad in his songs, Bob Dylan consciously modeled his early style on Woody Guthrie — in looks, and in sound. Author Larry David Smith calls this the “folk-posturing period”, and it is during this early part of his career that Dylan wrote tracks like “Song to Woody”. By identifying himself within the tradition of folk music he was able to reach an established audience, and expose them to new forms of political protest. Smith argues, “His acute awareness of his characters’ worldviews as they appear on the Iron Range, in depressed farming communities, and in unfair relationships; his understanding of the activists fighting for civil rights, fighting against imperialism, and for their right to be heard…directly inform his stories”. These are precisely the things that the mythical Tom Joad stood for in Steinbeck’s book and Guthrie’s songs. Dylan successfully carried the tradition and applied it to more contemporary issues: “Only a Pawn in Their Game” chronicles the killing of a civil rights advocate Medgar Evers; “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” recounts the 1963 murder of a poor woman at the hands of a socialite; and “Oxford Town” tells the story of James Meredith, the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi.

Dylan’s part in the revival of the protest song is significant due to the development of rock ‘n roll. Although his first three albums were located squarely within the genre of folk music, Dylan famously went electric later in his career as rock music grew in popularity. Dylan’s ability to reinvent himself has allowed him to remain one of America’s most prolific songwriters of the twentieth century, and as such he has kept the protest tradition going, while influencing new, younger musicians. His homage to Woody Guthrie has kept the popular myth of the Okies in the back of the minds of his generation, and has helped re-contextualise folk music’s tradition to a modern-day setting.

In the eighties, protest music was alive and well in America. With disillusionment in Reagan’s administration setting in by the second half of his presidency, some artists turned to the folk music tradition for answers. The failure of the American Dream meant that people were in need of a Tom Joad figure once again, and musicians began to approach the subject, as author Timothy Scheurer puts it, “Guthrielike, from the perspective of the common person”. One musician who best captured this idea was Bruce Springsteen, whose Born in the U.S.A album “proved to be the lightning rod for the voices of dissent”.

Springsteen used characters such as the Vietnam veteran in the song “Born in the USA” to talk about the “senselessness of a war that was a product of governmental paranoia and… the rejection that national embarrassment brings,” says Smith. The irony with this track is that many listeners misinterpreted the chorus’s powerful lines of “I was born in the USA” as a proud piece of American patriotism — when in reality Springsteen had meant something quite different. As author Jim Cullen argues, “It is a kind of pride born of failure, a pride that comes from an acceptance of the burden of history”.

Whatever the interpretation was of Springsteen’s best-known hit, it didn’t damage his reputation as a protest songwriter, and in 1995 he released his fourteenth album The Ghost of Tom Joad. In it, Springsteen uses the familiar figure of Steinbeck’s (although strictly speaking, John Ford’s version of) Tom Joad and turn him into a contemporary character. The song opens with men walking along railroad tracks, while highway patrol choppers fly overhead. While the original Joad was a poor white Southerner, the character here is from the Southwest, and like Springsteen’s other work, not necessarily white. While Tom Joad became a hero during the Great Depression, this character faces George Bush’s “new world order”. It is clear to see how Springsteen’s characterisation gives the song a relevant, modern voice, while linking it to the lineage of the past. He uses a character associated with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to talk about the racism, illegal immigration, discrimination and economic turmoil of the nineties. Another track from this album, “Across the Border” also encapsulates the sentiment of the Joad family as they look for hope in California. But nowhere is it more evident that the mythical figure of Tom Joad has endured the changing social and political climate of America, and yet has remained a necessary and important symbol of unity and hope among the common people across the country, than in The Ghost of Tom Joad.

The reasons for Joad’s longevity are obvious. The proximity between Steinbeck’s release of the novel, John Ford’s film adaptation of it, Woody Guthrie’s tribute song to Tom Joad, and to some extent, Dorothy Lange’s production of photography documenting the Okie migration meant that the character was never grounded in one particular medium. The fact that all these versions of the Joads’ story, and other migrant families, entered the popular consciousness at the same time helped build the myth in the minds of the people, who associated the concept or the idea of Tom Joad with being the hero of the people. It is because protest musicians have been able to adapt this concept of the character to their time that the myth has persisted throughout the years. Even with the growth of rock music, protest musicians were able to carry over a traditionally folk-orientated character and make him relevant to their audience. Bands such as Rage Against The Machine, a rap-metal outfit from the 1990s whose lyrics were heavily political, carried the flag of protest music into this new genre and brought with them similar narrative styles and symbols. The most obvious example of this is on their 2000 album, Renegades, in which they cover Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad — creating a much heavier version of the original and exposing the mythical figure of Joad to a newer, younger, perhaps more politically-radicalised audience. On Springsteen’s latest release, High Hopes, he has recorded a new version of the song — the original 1995 version was stripped down and mainly accompanied by an acoustic guitar. With Rage Against The Machine’s guitarist Tom Morello joining the E Street Band for this album, the new version of the song is punchier and heavier, and once again takes on a new meaning in this 21st century post-Iraq, post-recession, Obama-era context.

Tom Joad is, then, an intrinsic part of American folklore, and has earned a place within protest music and other forms of representation. While there are still those in the US who hold onto the hope of fulfilling the American Dream only to face the realities of oppression and suffering, Tom Joad will always remain, in the very least, a concept of hope for the people. For as long as musicians draw their inspiration from the rich history of protest song in order to find a character that their audience can identify with and who look up to as an activist who will stand up for their rights, the mythical figure of Tom Joad will continue to live on.

Bibliography

K. Windschuttle, “Steinbeck’s Myth of the Okies”, The New Criterion, 20, No. 10 (June, 2002)

J. Ambrose, The Violent World of Moshpit Culture (London, 2001)

J. Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (London, 1998)

B. Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public memory and American roots music (Chapel Hill, 2000)

J.N Gregory, American Exodus: the Dust Bowl migration and Okie culture in California (New York, 1989)

T.E. Scheurer, Born in the U.S.A.: the myth of America in popular music from colonial times to the present (Jackson, Miss, 1991)

C.J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence, 1997)

L.D. Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and American Song (Westport, Conn, 2002)

J. Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York, 1939)