Original version

BBC World Service

BBC World Service Radio

World Service Radio

The Documentary

Documentaries

Factual

Investigating global developments, issues and affairs.

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service East Asia

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

The Documentary: Dust Bowl Ballads

Joe Dixon - Rancher and Engineer

05/07/2016 GMT

Dust Bowl Ballads

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Dust Bowl Ballads

A fierce drought in Oklahoma’s ‘No Man’s Land’ stirs up dust storms, memories and myths

A fierce drought in Oklahoma’s ‘No Man’s Land’ stirs up dust storms, memories and myths.

A fierce drought in Oklahoma’s ‘No Man’s Land’ – a region that was the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl – stirs up dust storms, memories and myths. In this parched terrain of ghost towns and abandoned ranches, the wells are running dry, but the stories continue to flow.
 
Around ‘the Liars’ table’ at a roadside diner in the small prairie town of Boise City, old timers and young farmers share tales of dust storms past and present, trying to outdo each other in the retelling of local legends. Voices of Dust Bowl survivors entwine with stories of today’s drought. Stories blow out like drifts of sand, embellished with fine layers of imaginative silt.
 
Storytelling spins out of the landscape itself. Boise City was founded on a fiction by fraudsters who enticed people to buy plots of land in a town that did not exist. Expecting elegant, tree-lined streets and fountains, the newcomers found nothing but dirt. And when they ploughed it up, the dirt soon turned to dust.

Millard Fowler (who has sadly died since being recorded) was 102 years old, and remembers the ‘Dirty Thirties’, when relentless winds scooped up the topsoil and rolled it through the town in billowing black clouds, turning day to night.
 
Many families packed up and left, but those who stayed have a deep attachment to the land. The stories that echo through it today “may not all be straight down the bean line,” but they offer a subtle architecture of hope and survival.

(Photo: Joe Dixon, rancher and windmill engineer. Credit: Cicely Fell)

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Documentary

Dust Bowl Ballads

Genres

Brand

BBC World Service

About BBC World Service