Woody may have 'borrowed' his tunes and much of his imagery, but he certainly knew how to get to the heart of the matter. It took John Steinbeck (one of my alltime favs) several hundred pages to narrate THE GRAPES OF WRATH; it took John Ford two hours of film to show it. But it took Woody only 15 verses to sing it, and the Ballad of Tom Joad is every bit as powerful as either of the other versions.---John (not Jon)