Write those words on the palm of your hand.

Reader advisory: This thread is not a safe space and there are no songs.

This, and the Who was Hal 'Pappy' Horton? thread are a fuller examination of Hokum-Definition or sources? where that minstrel/vaudeville form was being redefined as “...a sort of black vaudeville...” while completely ignoring the biographies of artists such as Irving Berlin, Wade Mainer and The Woodrow Wilson Guthrie hisself.

"Woody" as “Tom Joad” is perhaps one of America's greatest hokum characters. Unfortunately his (auto)biographies are so overcome with hero worship and fictional interludes it's as if the purely nonfictional biography has yet to be written. Hence the title of this thread.

Woody Guthrie relocated from Pampa, Texas to Burbank, California in 1937 two years ahead of The Grapes of Wrath and the arrival Tom Joad on the pop culture scene. At that time he entertained the extended Guthrie and Crissman families under the minstrelsy pen name of “Rastus Brown.”