Donald Worster, Dust Bowl – The Southern Plains in the 1930s. "Suddenly there appeared on the northern horizon a black blizzard, moving toward them there was no sound, no wind, nothing but an immense 'boogery' cloud. This dusty old dust is a-getting’ my home,Ĭlass="summary"The lyrics are highly representative of the events of Black Sunday in the Texas panhandle, and suggest that Black Sunday may well have been the specific event that inspired those words more than any other. Straight for home all the people did run, It dusted us over, an’ it covered us under īlocked out the traffic and blocked out the sun, “A dust storm hit, an’ it hit like thunder Among them is the song “Dusty Old Dust,” which also became known as “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” In the original lyrics, he sings, “Of the place that I lived on the wild windy plains, in the month called April, county called Gray…” (Pampa was, and is, in Gray County. Many of his early songs were inspired by his personal experiences on the Texas High Plains during the dust storms of the 1930s. Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, who was born and grew up in Okemah, Oklahoma, moved to Pampa, Texas in 1931. The following are several cases in which history was impacted by Black Sunday: It struck Beaver around 4 PM, Boise City around 5:15 PM, and Amarillo at 7:20 PM. Winds in the panhandle reached upwards of 60 MPH, and for at least a brief time, the blackness was so complete that one could not see their own hand in front of their face. But the worst conditions were in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, where the rolling mass raced more toward the south-southwest - accompanied by a massive wall of blowing dust that resembled a land-based tsunami. It raced to the south and southeast across the main body of Oklahoma that evening, accompanied by heavy blowing dust, winds of 40 MPH or more, and rapidly falling temperatures. The wall of blowing sand and dust first blasted into the eastern Oklahoma panhandle and far northwestern Oklahoma around 4 PM.
Famous songs were written about it, and on the following day, the world would hear the region referred to for the first time as “The Dust Bowl.” The day is known in history as “Black Sunday,” when a mountain of blackness swept across the High Plains and instantly turned a warm, sunny afternoon into a horrible blackness that was darker than the darkest night. They were known as dirt storms, sand storms, black blizzards, and “dusters.” It seemed as if it could get no worse, but on Sunday, the 14th of April 1935, it got worse.
Settlers dealt not only with the Great Depression, but also with years of drought that plunged an already-suffering society into an onslaught of relentless dust storms for days and months on end. The 1930s were times of tremendous hardship on the Great Plains.
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