We knew when they jacked up their prices. We didn’t want money, so we didn’t steal money, and we spoiled them, we petted them, and we humored them. We smiled in through their cages a nickel at a time. We smiled across their counters a penny at a time. We didn’t want other folks’ money If it meant they had to do without. We didn’t want money just for the sake of having money.

“We’re to blame because we let them steal,” she told him. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.” But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.

Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good.

Woody guthrie die biographie joe klein