Okie Song

Harpsong, Rilla Askew, 2007

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Harlan Singer is a part Cherokee musical hobo who unlike Woodie Guthrie, cannot seem to get very far away from Oklahoma. Harlan, taught by a black shoe shine boy, he plays the harmonica and can imitate almost any sound in nature from birds to wind, is always creating new songs with new lyrics to describe what he sees. He wins the heart of a fourteen year old Oklahoma farm girl, Sharon, and together they jump freight trains to Hoovervilles throughout the Midwest. Unlike Steinbeck’s Okies, they never get to California.

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Harlan is looking for Profit, a bible spouting old man Harlan is indebted to in some unknown way. They return to Oklahoma time and again to look for Sharon’s family who have moved on when their farm is foreclosed, and to visit Calm Bledsoe, the Cherokee trapper (the Cherokee were relocated to Oklahoma from the Great Smokies Mountains of Tennessee – North Carolina see) who is Harlan’s only friend and confidant. Set in the depth of the great depression we revisit the farm foreclosures and bank failures, the useless miner’s strikes, and the dust bowl.

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Written alternately from Sharon’s and Harlan’s points of view, with occasional visits to the folk legends they become, we get a real sense of time and place.