I was just headed down the cellar stairs, singing a little Woody to myself. I guess Mother must have heard me. “What’s that?” she asked.

“One of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads. He wrote a whole bunch of ‘em back in the Thirties, about the Okies being dusted out of their farms and heading for the Promised Land on the West Coast. Bad times, boy! A terrific depression and an agricultural disaster, to boot.”

“But they were the Roosevelt years, too. Not everything was awful then. Tommy Dorsey and Harry James weren’t playing sad music. And don’t forget ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’”

“Yeah, you’re right. It was the theme song of the first Roosevelt campaign. I’ve got it on You Tube by Jack Hylton and his orchestra. You want to hear it?” She didn’t. But she did have a provocative idea.

“You know, we’ve lived through seven decades of popular music so far, and it’s interesting how it’s changed to suit the times. Even back as far as Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the English band supposedly played ‘The World Turned Upside Down.’”

She was right. All of us my age remember deathless lyrics like these from the Forties:

During the Fifties nothing was wrong – or appeared to be – except for the alleged infiltration of the State Department by Communists. We followed a ball bouncing atop lyrics on the TV screen and sang along with Mitch Miller and his orchestra: “Tzena, Tzena,” “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Four-Leaf Clover.” Were we ever that innocent? Yep, we were. But monsters of censorship stirred just beneath the surface. A few groups – notably the Weavers – sang lyrics that sounded a lot like Woody’s earlier union and socialist stuff, and were blacklisted. The Kingston Trio picked up the folk idiom, starting with “Tom Dooley,” but studiously avoided controversy. Elvis Presley was a smash, but in terms of social change, only heat lightning on the horizon.

Vietnam, coupled with the compulsory draft and punctuated by the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther KIng, changed almost everything. Anti-war protest started more or less with Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (first performed, incredibly, by Marlene Dietrich in French in Paris). The Beatles suggested youthful alternatives to the values and maxims of our post-Victorian parents. And soon we had Dylan:

He was followed by Woody’s boy Arlo, who gave us “Alice’s Restaurant,” the ultimate antiwar song of the Sixties. But by then, as an earlier Dylan song had predicted, the times they were a-changing. Both Mother and have I quit trying to keep up with popular music during the past thirty years, as it evolved into what to me sounds like somebody throwing empty trash cans down a fire escape. But with this decade winding down, the country wrestling with a fiscal calamity, and bonus-baby moguls skipping away from the game with tens of millions, while hundreds of thousands are rousted out of their homes or left with little or nothing, it may be time to bring back that old friend of the working man, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie:

Because today even California ain’t got the do-re-mi.