FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads Actually Make Pretty Good Comics

The life of America's troubadour is chronicled in this 272 page graphic novel.

Woody Guthrie was nothing if not a storyteller, so it makes perfect sense for his life to be fictionalised. In the graphic novel Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads, artist Nick Hayes brings the iconic folk singer—who has influenced everybody from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to Wilco—back to life. Recently re-released in hardback, its sepia pages evoke dust bowl towns in Oklahoma and Texas ravaged by drought and the depression, and pay tribute to one of America’s most beloved songwriters.

Advertisement

Hayes, who previously wrote a graphic novel version of Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and has also worked as a cartoonist for the Guardian, begins his tale in the 1920s when Guthrie was a teenager in post-boomtown Oklahoma. It traces Guthrie’s journey across the country, visiting factory farms and migrant camps in California, and learning to tell stories with music—first with a harmonica, and then a guitar.

Guthrie built his songwriting career as a troubadour traveling through depression-ravaged towns, making friends with displaced farmers and learning traditional folk and blues songs that had been passed down the generations, and using them as inspiration for his own songs.

Hayes' graphic novel builds up to the year 1940, when Guthrie finally makes his way to New York City—and writes the lyrics of “This Land is Your Land”, the anthem that came to define America’s landscape. It’s since been covered by just about every folk musician ever, and played at several presidential inaugurations. It was in 1940 that Guthrie first released a commercial compilation of the dust bowl ballads he'd accrued over time.

You can find out more about Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads here.

Related:

Studio Ghibli Storytelling Inspires a South African Graphic Novel A Graphic Novel Illustrates Cybersecurity, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Iran The World's First Computer Programmer Becomes a Comic Book Superheroine