Lyric of the day from Woody Guthrie

Up writing early this morning and listening to Woody Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Ballads." Went to sleep with it on, too. It's excellent to have on low at this hour, to the point the words are barely audible, though Guthrie is all about words -- not music.

It's middle-of-the-night music. (I learned several years ago not to fight a story. I slept soundly for six hours and awoke at 4 with the blocks of a story for the Sunday paper falling into place in my head; had to get up and put them down in the laptop before I lost them.)

Any way, real quick before I jump back to football, "Dust Bowl Ballads" is considered one song cycle by Guthrie, his terrifyingly close look at the migration of drought refugees from his native Oklahoma to California during the latter days of the Great Depression. According to Joe Klein's "Woody Guthrie: A Life," Guthrie heard a bouncy Baptist hymn in the migrant camps and adapted it in 1938.

Sadly, the song will always be timely. Is there anything more pathetic than the arrogance bred by inherited wealth?

"Now as I look around, it's mighty plain to see
This world is such a great and a funny place to be;
Oh, the gamblin' man is rich an' the workin' man is poor,
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore."