Woody Guthrie baseerde “Ain’t Got No Home” op een oude gospelsong, “This World Is Not My Home”. De song riep de armen op te berusten in hun lot en hun hoop te vestigen op het leven na de dood, een boodschap die de overtuigde socialist Guthrie tegen de borst stuitte: “It was telling them to accept the hovels and the hunger and the disease. It was telling them not to strike, and not to fight back. He was outraged by the idea that such an innocent-sounding song could be so insidious”. Woody herschreef de tekst en de rest is geschiedenis. De versie van Bruce Springsteen is misschien nog wel mooier dan die van Woody Guthrie.
I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ‘round,
Just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Was a-farmin’ on the shares, and always I was poor;
My crops I lay into the banker’s store.
My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
I mined in your mines and I gathered in your corn
I been working, mister, since the day I was born
Now I worry all the time like I never did before
‘Cause I ain’t got no home in this world anymore
Now as I look around, it’s mighty plain to see
This world is such a great and a funny place to be;
Oh, the gamblin’ man is rich an’ the workin’ man is poor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Uitgelichte afbeelding: By New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Al Aumuller – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3c13276.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1574980
