However, two of the thirteen songs recorded on the sessions, "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues" were left out due to length.

In 1950, and in 1964 during the American folk music revival, reissues were released in LP format by Folkways Records after RCA refused Guthrie's request to re-issue the album.

[7] Like many of Guthrie's later recordings, these songs contain an element of social activism, and would be an important influence on later musicians, including Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Phil Ochs and Joe Strummer.

"Blowin' Down This Road" has a more defiant tone with the repetition of the line "I ain't a-gonna be treated this-a-way."

This is a cautionary tale to all those others traveling across the country who were dreaming of a promised land or “Garden of Eden” as Guthrie calls it in the song, telling them there’s so many people going to California it might be better to go back east.

Guthrie captures the hopelessness of the crop and bank failures, the rigors of the journey west and the crushing disappointment that ensued when California offered a reality nearly as harsh as the land left behind.

The final song on Volume 1, split into two parts, tells the story of “Tom Joad", the leading character in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

"Wherever people ain’t free/Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights,” he sings, “That’s where I’m a-gonna be.” Volume 2 starts out with the waltz "The Great Dust Storm", describing the catastrophe when a giant dust storm hits the Great Plains "On the fourteenth day of April of 1935", transforming the landscape and resulting in a diaspora of people heading west where they have been promised there is work aplenty picking fruit in the lush valleys of California.

"Vigilante Man" is an attack on the hired thugs who harassed the Dust Bowl refugees, which contained a verse referring to Preacher Casey, a character in The Grapes of Wrath.

This was called Talking Dust Bowl and contained just eight tracks with the two sides subtitled into two groups of songs: RCA protested, but, in the face of Guthrie's go-ahead, backed off, giving Folkways tacit permission to do a second reissue as a 12" LP.

Their re-release reshuffled the original order of tracks and took the opportunity to include the two extra songs recorded on the 1940 sessions and previously unreleased, being "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues": Sixty years after the recordings were first released, Woody Guthrie's odes to the Dust Bowl were presented in their fourth different configuration for a CD edition digitally remastered by Doug Pomeroy.