furniture there was another oklahoma native they called her sis cunningham and she would sing with pete seegerf dirt farmers we fought to survive we fought the hundred and illness without doctors and the washes and hailstorms, the death of livestock. now we could have endured all of those normal disasters, but there was no way in god's world to east cape the shark's teeth of the bankers and that's what happened and woody remembered the further west you walk, the browner, the hotter, stiller and emptier the country gets. i met the hard rock miners desert rats and hold swarms of hitchhikers and migratory workers swat with their little piles of belonging in the shade of a big sum boards out across the flat hard crust gravelling desert. kids chasing around in the sun, leedy is cooking scrappy meals and buckets and scouring the plates clean with sand work pants, slacks, cotton dresses, they gather around us and they would sing, too. but sometimes they just stand real quiet and listen, and i knew what they was thinking about. well, by 1936 the year of roosevelt's terse reflections of a first family

a lot of americans never even heard them until january of 2009 when bruce springsteen and pete seeger sang them from the steps of the lincoln memorial at barack obama's inaugural concert and newspapers said that is the way woody wrote it? that is the way woody wrote it. i will leave you with a version that i think pretty well charts the progression of this song from the angry and bitter satire it was to the unofficial national anthem that eventually became. thank you for coming out and listening tonight. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. [applause] >> you are watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> up next a panel discussion on conservative books from the 2011 young americans foundation national conservative student conference. this is about an hour. >> nice to have bright eyed and bushy tail students. young america foundation in case you haven't heard of us is an educational organization promoting conservatism and our ideas on the nation's college campus through lectures, publications and conferencess. in the last year