{"id":428,"date":"2016-02-18T07:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=428"},"modified":"2025-02-18T15:05:57","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T20:05:57","slug":"hard-travelin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hard-travelin\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard Travelin&#8217; (Woody Guthrie)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Hard Travelin&#039;\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1MJ4TPT7oF4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Woody said:<em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>This is a song about the hard traveling of the working people, not the moonstruck mystic traveling of the professional vacationist. Song about a man that has rode the flat wheelers, kicked up cinders, dumped the red <\/em><em><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-429\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/guthrie-bound-for-glory-cover-213x300.jpg?resize=213%2C300\" alt=\"guthrie-bound-for-glory-cover\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/guthrie-bound-for-glory-cover.jpg?resize=213%2C300&amp;ssl=1 213w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/guthrie-bound-for-glory-cover.jpg?w=225&amp;ssl=1 225w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 213px) 100vw, 213px\" \/><\/em><em>hot slag, hit the hard rock tunneling, hard harvesting, the hard rock jail, looking for a woman that&#8217;s hard to find.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>To be fair, Woody never dumped any red hot slag nor did any mining, and everyone I&#8217;ve ever heard sing this song does it in the same spirit I do, caught up in the romance of the open road&#8211;it was songs like this that sent me hitchhiking around the world and even hopping a few freight trains.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve known this so long that I have no idea where I learned it or from whom. I can&#8217;t find it on any of the Woody Guthrie albums I had, and I didn&#8217;t get the Cisco Houston 10-inch with this song till later, nor did I have it by Ramblin&#8217; Jack, or Pete Seeger. Maybe I just heard someone sing it someplace, then pulled the words out of a songbook&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;which would explain why, when I recorded it on my CD and played it for Dave Van Ronk, he pointed out that I wasn&#8217;t really singing Woody&#8217;s melody&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;or maybe not, since by now I&#8217;ve heard a couple of Woody&#8217;s versions, and Cisco&#8217;s, and a bunch of other people&#8217;s, and I still sing it this way. Just one of those pig-headed ramblin&#8217; men, I guess.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-430 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/hobos-hopping-train.jpg?resize=300%2C222&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"hobos hopping train\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" \/>Incidentally, for those who want a glossary to go with the freight train verse:<\/p>\n<p><em>flat wheeler: <\/em>a car that rides hard, bouncing and shaking like the wheels were flat.<\/p>\n<p><em>blind passenger: <\/em>a boxcar, for the logical reason that they&#8217;re relatively comfortable to ride, but have no windows. There&#8217;s a big door, and the view is a lot better than out of a window if it&#8217;s open &#8212; and I always kept them open, because it&#8217;s safer that way. But if you want to hide from the railroad guards, you ride with them almost closed, just propped with a chunk of wood or something so you won&#8217;t get locked inside. (At least, that&#8217;s my understanding of the term &#8212; I can&#8217;t find any confirmation on the internet, and don&#8217;t have my hobo dictionaries handy.)<\/p>\n<p><em>dead ender:<\/em> damned if I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Woody said: This is a song about the hard traveling of the working people, not the moonstruck mystic traveling of the professional vacationist. Song about a man that has rode the flat wheelers, kicked up cinders, dumped the red hot slag&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Hard Travelin&#039; (Woody Guthrie) - Old Friends: A Songobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Woody said: This is a song about the hard traveling of the working people, not the moonstruck mystic traveling of the professional vacationist. 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My mother was good about buying me records...","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Woody archive of folk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Woody-archive-of-folk.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cannonball-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":428,"position":1},"title":"Cannonball Blues (Woody, Carters, Leslie Riddle)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"As I explain in the clip, I've known this since I was a kid, though back then I would have played it with a flatpick. My first musical heroes were Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, with Pete Seeger running a close third. In my twenties it occurred to me that\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/FW31010.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3088,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/mail-myself-to-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":428,"position":2},"title":"Mail Myself to You (Woody Guthrie)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 9, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This is one of my favorite Woody Guthrie songs, and also one of the mysteries of my life on the folk scene, because... why do people keep saying it's a kids' song? Haven't they read Woody's books and looked at his drawings? Don't they know a love song when they\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/pete-seeger-little-boxes-cbs-5.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5918,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/grand-coulee-dam\/","url_meta":{"origin":428,"position":3},"title":"Grand Coulee Dam (Woody Guthrie)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 31, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"A good indication of how deeply Woody Guthrie affected my life is that I grew up the son of two college professors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the first time I saw the Columbia River Gorge I was riding a flatcar on a freight train. I've written about that trip in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Grand-Coulee-Dam.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Grand-Coulee-Dam.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Grand-Coulee-Dam.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Grand-Coulee-Dam.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":225,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/worried-man-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":428,"position":4},"title":"Worried Man Blues (Woody Guthrie\/Carter Family)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 21, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"An early country blues from the Carter Family via Woody Guthrie, with touches of Sam McGee...","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Sara Carter","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Sara-Carter-204x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4543,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/one-dime-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":428,"position":5},"title":"One Dime Blues (Lemon Jefferson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 18, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I love Lemon Jefferson's singing and playing, and for a while immersed myself in his guitar style, but he was such a distinctive and quirky player\u00a0 that most of my efforts just sounded like half-assed imitations of what he happened to play on a given day. 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