Tom Joad

DESCRIPTION: "Tom Joad got out of the Old McAlister Pen, There he got his parole." The song summarizes the hard times faced by the Joad Family in the Depression, ending with Tom's declaration, "Wherever men are fightin' for their rights, That's where I'm a gonna be"
AUTHOR: Woody Guthrie
EARLIEST DATE: 1940 (recorded by Guthrie)
KEYWORDS: prison homicide police hardtimes death home dustbowl travel clergy
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Apr 14, 1939 - Publication of "The Grapes of Wrath"
1940 - Release of the movie version of "The Grapes of Wrath"
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, pp. 499-501, "Tom Joad" (1 text, 1 tune)
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, pp. 289-291, "Tom Joad" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #16649
NOTES [337 words]: Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest lists both words and music of this as being by Woody Guthrie, but the tune is unquestionably "John Hardy," with no significant changes.
The song of course is a summary of John Steinbeck's book The Grapes of Wrath.
There are inconsistencies in the accounts of how the song came to be. According to Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie, W. W. Norton, 2004, pp. 179-180, the RCA (Victor) recording company had approached Alan Lomax about recording a folk song album. Lomax was busy, and suggested they hire Guthrie. They wanted twelve songs.
According to Pete Seeger, the Victor people had asked Guthrie for a song about Tom Joad. Pete asked Woody if he had read the book. Woody said he had not but had seen the movie. He spent all night one night working on it, and Seeger found it in the typewriter in the morning. Seeger said that the movie songwriter had done half the work of condensing it, and Woody had done the rest of the work getting the story down to six minutes and seventeen verses. (It took two sides of a 78 to hold it.)
Cray, pp. 180-181n, believes that this story almost certainly isn't entirely true. Guthrie had read the book -- and had even met John Steinbeck. This is based on a recollection by Will Geer, who said that Guthrie wrote the song before the movie appeared. Since we don't have an exact date of composition, we can't prove this either way. What we can say is that the movie was released on March 15, 1940. Woody in fact talked about the movie in a Daily Worker column of March 30, 1940. Woody was in the studio recording his songs between April 26 and May 3, 1940. Thus the movie came out before the first date on which the song can be proved to exist -- but we don't know how much earlier Woody wrote the piece. Based on the surviving evidence, it is at least possible that he saw the movie rather than reading the book. But Cray thinks Woody had read it and was just playing the "ordinary man" who didn't read much. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: LDC499

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