Leaving Oklahoma

Listen to this song by Chris Knight called "Broken Plow" as it tells the story of the migrant farmer who has been forced to leave his home. How does the song make you feel? What emotions does it evoke from within you? What does it make you think of from The Grapes of Wrath (especially chapters 10 & 11) as you listen to the lyrics and to the melody?



Load up the old Dodge truck
We’ll leave what we can’t sell
Nobody needs a sharecropper’s tools
or a dust filled well
Take you one last look around
shed you one last tear

For the broken plow, the broken dreams
And the life we’re leaving here

Pull the lines down tight
The kids can ride on top of the load
In the cool of the night
They can crawl underneath the tarp
To stay out of the cold
Eleven hundred miles of mountain and sand
We’ll cross ‘em tired and torn
If this beat up truck can carry us
Far enough away from the storm


We’re going to California
There’s work there for a man
Too proud to beg for charity
Too poor to make a stand
Pray it’s just the land we’re losing
Not my life’s blood that I leave
On the handles of that broken plow
That haunts me in my dreams

A man at a roadside station
Don’t like dealing with my kind
He’d beat me out of my last dollar
And never look me in the eye
I heard ‘em call us Okies
Hell I don’t know what that means
But something tells me the promised land
Ain’t as promising as it seems

We’re going to California
There’s work there for a man
Too proud to beg for charity
Too poor to make a stand
Pray it’s just the land we’re losing
Not my life’s blood that I leave
On the handles of that broken plow
That haunts me in my dreams


This restless road is full of strangers
They ain’t no stranger than I am
Hardened faces damn the dust and curse the wind
That drove us from this life and home
We’ll never know again

We’re going to California
There’s work there for a man
Too proud to beg for charity
Too poor to make a stand
Pray it’s just the land we’re losing
Not my life’s blood that I leave
On the handles of that broken plow
That haunts me in my dreams