Capo 5th fret

Standard (EADGBE)

Load up the old Dodge truck

 We’ll leave what we can’t sell

Nobody needs a sharecropper’s tools

or a dust filled well

Take you one last look around

shed you one last tear

 For the broken plow, the broken dreams

 And the life we’re leaving here

Pull the lines down tight

The kids can ride on top of the load

In the cool of the night

They can crawl underneath the tarp

To stay out of the cold

Eleven hundred miles of mountain and sand

We’ll cross ‘em tired and torn

If this beat up truck can carry us

Far enough away from the storm

Chorus

 We’re going to California

 There’s work there for a man

 Too proud to beg for charity

 Too poor to make a stand

 Pray it’s just the land we’re losing

 Not my life’s blood that I leave

 On the handles of that broken plow

That haunts me in my dreams

A man at a roadside station

Don’t like dealing with my kind

He’d beat me out of my last dollar

And never look me in the eye

I heard ‘em call us Okies

Hell I don’t know what that means

But something tells me the promised land

Ain’t as promising as it seems

Chorus

Bridge

This restless road is full of strangers

They ain’t no stranger than I am

Hardened faces damn the dust and curse the wind

 That drove us from this life and home

 We’ll never know again

Chorus

On the handles of my broken plow that haunts me in my dreams