A timeless folk anthem warning of the false promises of the promised land.
The Dust Bowl Ballad with a Texas Folk Heart
Oh, the memories a song can stir! Cast your mind back to 1993, a time when the roots of folk and Americana were finding new life through interpreters like the luminous Nanci Griffith. The track we’re revisiting, “Do Re Mi,” featuring the legendary singer-songwriter Guy Clark, wasn’t a new composition at all, but a cover that felt as vital and timely as ever. It was a key jewel on Griffith’s Grammy-winning tenth studio album, Other Voices, Other Rooms, released on March 2, 1993, by Elektra Records. This entire album was a heartfelt tribute, a collection of cover songs honoring the folk and country writers who shaped her own narrative genius.
The album itself was a commercial success for the folk genre, climbing to the Number 54 position on the Billboard Pop Albums chart in 1993, a respectable showing for a collection of traditional and contemporary folk material. While “Do Re Mi” was not released as a charting single, its inclusion—and the teaming of Griffith with her fellow Texan troubadour Guy Clark—was a powerful statement on the lineage and resilience of the folk tradition.
The real story and meaning behind “Do Re Mi” takes us back much further, to the pen of the original balladeer, Woody Guthrie, who wrote it in 1937 and recorded it for his landmark 1940 album, Dust Bowl Ballads. It’s not a lighthearted ditty, despite its deceptively simple, almost nursery-rhyme-like title. Guthrie’s song is a grim, yet jaunty, warning to would-be migrants from the hard-hit Dust Bowl states—Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, and Tennessee—to think twice before heading for California. The golden state, he cautioned, was not a paradise where “sweet milk and honey flows,” but a place where the police, known as the “border patrol,” were eager to turn away those without the “Do Re Mi”—the literal money—to survive. The heart of the song’s meaning is a sobering message about economic desperation, the illusion of opportunity, and the cold reality of being a penniless outsider in a land that only welcomes the wealthy.
Griffith and Clark’s duet version is a beautiful, warm take on this Depression-era lament. Hearing their voices intertwine—Griffith’s famously crystalline, almost girlish soprano paired with Clark’s gravelly, lived-in baritone—lends an extraordinary depth to Guthrie’s classic. It’s a conversation between two kindred spirits, two Texans steeped in the same dust and dreams that Guthrie once chronicled. The acoustic arrangement, simple and uncluttered, allows the lyrical storytelling to take center stage, inviting the listener to reflect on the cyclical nature of poverty and migration that still echoes today. It’s a poignant moment of passing the torch, of a new generation of folk storytellers—the “folkabilly” darling and the master craftsman—paying their respects to the grand-daddy of them all. For those of us who came of age listening to these voices, this track isn’t just a song; it’s an heirloom, a gentle reminder that the best music always tells the truth, no matter how hard it is to hear.