Song information On this page you can find the lyrics of the song Beaumont Rag, artist - Woody Guthrie. Album song The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings, in the genre Кантри
Date of issue: 05.11.2019
Record label: Limitless Int
Song language: English
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 |