Tonight (Friday 7/28), on All Things Considered's "Lost and Found Sound", there was a fifteen or so minute feature piece on the work of a man who toured the California Central Valley recording the Dust Bowl refugees. The program is available over Real Player here:

http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/current.html

Here is the way NPR describes the piece:

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"In 1940 two sound recordists, Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin, traveled to the California central valley-- the flat, agricultural land that Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. There, hundreds of refugees from Arkansas and Oklahoma had gathered- an exodus from their drought ridden and Depression ravaged homelands. Dispatched by the Library of Congress, Todd and Sonkin set off to create an audio oral history of the lives of these Dust Bowl refugees.

"Many of the refugee farmers made their new homes in Migratory Labor Camps, created for them by the Farm Security Administration. There, despite great poverty and displacement, they created a vibrant community. The sounds of their new lives-- the storytelling, love ballads, debates and square dance calls of a people in transit-- were captured in these evocative recordings by Todd, Sonkin and a fifty pound "Presto" disc recorder."

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What the descriptive piece doesn't say is that this piece is a gem. It combines music and the stories of the real life models for Steinbeck's famous novel. If you have any interest in this period of American history or in the music, you will like visiting these camps of 60 years ago. I was fascinated

Sourdough