Anything worth discussing was worth a song to Woody.... I remember the night he wrote the song "Tom Joad." He said, "Pete, do you know where I can get a typewriter?"
I said, "I'm staying with someone who has one."
"Well, I got to write a ballad," he said. "I don't usually write ballads to order, but Victor wants me to do a whole album of Dust Bowl songs, and they say they want one about Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath."
I asked him if he had read the book and he said, "No, but I saw the movie. Good movie."
He went along to the place I was staying -- six flights walking up -- on East Fourth Street. The friend I was staying with (Jerry Oberwager) said, "Sure, you can use my typewriter."
Woody had a half-gallon jug of wine with him, sat down and started typing away. He would stand up every few seconds and test out a verse on his guitar and sit down and type some more. About one o'clock my friend and I got so sleepy we couldn't stay awake. In the morning we found Woody curled up on the floor under the table; the half gallon of wine was almost empty and the completed ballad was sitting near the typewriter.
And it is one of his masterpieces. It's a long song -- about six minutes -- and it compresses the whole novel into about twenty verses. It doesn't cover every detail, but it gets an awful lot of them.
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You can escape your destiny but you cannot escape Pete.
Don't look now, but Uncle Pete is sitting there behind you rocking in his rocking chair to the sound of your song, slightly hunched, head up, hands clasped, smiling, approving...
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