GRAND COOLEE DAM If you ever want to build a house orlight up a town, or bring the people power, the secret is this: Sing about your people, not about your millionaire play folks. The rich ones hired airplanes full of entertainers and stars to come up to Oregon, Washington, Montana and Wyoming and tell the people that they didn't need no Coolee Dam at all, that is, not for the next couple of centuries. Take too much work and materials and would make the wheels run entirely too nice and light up the country entirely too bright. The world didn't need no more houses with electricity in them, no more factory towns singing with light metals and aluminum, no more flying fortresses zipping through the clouds. Then I sung another little song to sort of put these airplane loads of fonies back in their place.
THIS LAND IS MADE FOR YOU AND ME After we built the Coolee Dam we had to sell the people out there a lot of bonds to get the money to buy the copper wire and high lines and pay a whole big bunch of people at work and I don't know what all. We called them Public Utility Bonds, just about like a War Bond, same thing. (And a lot of politicians told the folks not to buy them but we sold them anyhow). The main idea about this song is, you think about these Eight words all the rest of your life and they'll come a bubbling up into Eighty Jillion all Union. Try it and see. THIS LAND IS MADE FOR YOUR AND ME.
HARD TRAVELING This is a song about the hard traveling of the working people, not the moonstruck mystic traveling of the professional vacationists. Song about a man that has rode the flat wheelers, kicked up cinders, dumped the red hot slag, hit the hard rock tunneling, hard harvesting, the hard rock jail, looking for a woman that's hard to find.
JACKHAMMER JOHN I guess I went by a million names and nobody knows me yet. And I don't guess I even know my own self yet. Maybe I don't know my own country here yet. I danced my duck on the whippachuck and skippered the blue canoe. I outworked old Paul Bunyan and six of his blue babe oxes. I can knock down more rock with my jackhammer in ten minutes than old Pecos Bill can by riding a cyclone to a dead stop. I hired out up here on this Saint Lawerence Seaway just lately and I ain't seen nobody around here that can turn out half as much work with both hands as I can with one. My name's Jackhammer John and I say we need more seaways, more shipways, more skyways, shiptrails and barge lines, more loading ports and more hands at work around here. My old jackhammer runs white hot to win this war and to kill fascism, but she runs a lot hotter to build this old world back up again. Gonna be a nice old world to look at when we all get to working together on her.
BED ON YOUR FLOOR I sing this song mainly just to make you think that I had a little run in with a man and had to lay him dead down on the floor, that the sheriff's on my trail with his big forty four, that the clock's striking midnight with daylight to go. But the mainest reason why I'm singing it is just to get to lay my head in a bed on your floor.
