In the 1830s, the First Americans were dragged to Oklahoma, but a century later in the 1930s, everyone wanted to leave.

Unprecedented drought and poor farming practices created what was called the Dust Bowl – the worst manmade ecological disaster in the history of planet Earth.

In 1935 alone, more than 850 million tons of topsoil were blown away by winds from overused fields — 8 tons for every resident in the U.S.

Storms created “Black Blizzards” of dust where visibility could be reduced to three feet and cause lethal health problems.

“Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935, was the single worst day. You can get some idea of what it was like in a virtual reality exhibit at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.

Wearing a virtual reality helmet, you find yourself sitting on the porch of an Oklahoma farmhouse, listening to crickets on a peaceful afternoon. But then in the distance, a black cloud begins to form. And come closer.

First come jack rabbits and deer, running for their lives past your farm on all sides in terror, trying to outrace the storm. Then the cloud comes closer.

Unlike a tornado that is destructive in just a small area, the Black Sunday storm packed the power of a tornado, but was 200 miles wide with winds blowing at 65 mph. Shingles start to fly off the roof above you, trees and brush are blown on to the porch and then… oblivion!

Some 2.5 million people in mid-west states lost everything they owned and had to relocate, 440,000 of them from Oklahoma alone. Many of the “Okies,” as they were called, tried to flee to California. Where nobody wanted them. California police formed “Bum Blockades” at the borders that beat poor people and turned them away. John Steinbeck chronicled the situation in his famous novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Woody Guthrie of Oklahoma

Another champion of Okies was a former Oklahoman named Woody Guthrie.  He survived Black Sunday and fled to California, where he began singing on radio station KFVD with songs about fighting for the rights of all people against tyranny, oppression, and bigotry.

He painted on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists,” and his songs were called the “Dust Bowl Ballads.” You can still hear them and many of the other 3,000 songs he wrote in the Woody Guthrie Center.

No one would be more surprised by this new high-tech museum devoted to Woody Guthrie than Woody Guthrie. For one thing, there’s no evidence he ever went to Tulsa.

For another, Woody never achieved this kind of fame in his lifetime, which was spent mostly in New York and California, but always fighting and singing about the disenfranchised.

He wrote,  “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. 

I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.” Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Madona and others could not have said it better and have picked up the mantle of singing songs to make people feel better about themselves.

Woody’s songs, to be honest, at least to my 21^st century ears, are hard to identify with and involve a style of music we might today call “hillbilly” singing. Listen to his rendition of House of the Rising Sun and it sounds strange to modern listeners. 

But the museum brings the songs and Woody’s life together into a variety of multi-media experiences, and at least if you can’t identify directly with the music, you can certainly identify with the thoughts he expressed and the musicians he influenced.

One of them was a 19-year-old kid living in Greenwich Village, NY, who would take a bus out to New Jersey to the state hospital where Woody was dying at age 55. The kid would go just to talk to him, play his songs, and learn from him. That kid was Bob Dylan, and that’s why the Bob Dylan Center is in Tulsa, next to Woody’s.

I n his autobiography, “Chronicles, Volume One,”

 Bob Dylan said that he wrote his first song in 1959 as “an homage in lyric and melody to the man who’d pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny – the great Woody Guthrie.

I wrote the song with him in mind…having no idea that it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write. My life had never been the same since I’d first heard Woody on a record player…When I first heard him it was like a million-megaton bomb had dropped.”

How you relate to the Bob Dylan Center will probably depend on what you think and know of Bob Dylan. If, like me, you think he is the greatest singer-songwriter in American history, it will be a monumental experience.

It is done perfectly. Here are the notebooks, where in incredibly tiny penmanship, Dylan wrote the lyrics of some of his most famous songs.

This is not a Hard Rock Café or an Elvis Graceland museum with just guitars and outfits, but rather a thoughtful examination through videos, photos, interviews and writing that follows the trajectory of one of the most influential musicians of history, looking at what he was trying to say, and how he interacted with and changed history. 

Around the outer walls, panels follow his career and changes in music styles, while in the center there are panels that deal with individual songs, people he was influenced by, and the people he influenced, which is just about everybody in folk and rock ‘n roll.

When the Singing Stopped

No trip to Oklahoma is complete without visiting the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial — a place where protest by singing stopped. On April 19, 1995, a madman named Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck full of explosives, set the fuse and walked away. It exploded at 9:02 a.m. killing 168 people, including 19 children. The bomb injured another 680 people, destroyed or damaged 325 buildings and burned 86 cars in what was, and still is, the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history.

Today, the memorial is a peaceful reflection pool with huge entrance gates on either side that are labeled 9:01 a.m. at one end – a place where the nation was still peace, and 9:03 a.m. at the other end – a time where everything had changed.

National Park rangers can show you where the truck and building were located, they can talk about the casualties and point out the trees and sculptures and memorial reflecting pool. The one thing they can’t tell you is, why? Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s because people stopped singing in protest. Except in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Bound? 

Oklahoma City and Tulsa are exciting and booming cities. Tulsa has the third highest number of Art Deco buildings in the U.S. and many of them have been turned into hip hotels, restaurants, bars, and breweries – all in a fun downtown walkable area that includes the Dylan and Guthrie centers.

OKC is in the midst of a revival with a canal lined with bars and cafes, a free downtown botanic garden, and fun restored old hotels and bars. Everywhere, there are innovative young people doing cool things.

My friend, travel photographer Matt Payne, turned an abandoned downtown convention center into a movie studio where the $176 million “Twister 2” is being filmed. That’s the new spirit of Oklahoma City.

It would be cheapest and easiest to fly to OKC, rent a car there, and drive to Tulsa on the fun, historic Route 66. What a road! In 1927, almost every town in America had paved their main street for a few blocks to keep out mud and dirt, but all paved streets ended at the edge of town.

That’s when Cyrus Avery of Tulsa Oklahoma proposed an idea — the U.S. government could create a highway from Chicago to Los Angeles simply by paving the dirt road sections between each town, creating one long paved “main street” that would run for 2,448 miles.

How Route 66 Was Created

Of course, it was not that simple, but basically that’s how Route 66 was created, and while certainly much of it has changed, the 119 miles of the old Route 66 between Oklahoma City and Tulsa are identified and marked as a scenic highway. 

Driving it is a hoot of following signs, getting off highways and passing through old downtowns (most of them dying) filled with kitsch diners, old abandoned service stations, motor courts, 1930s murals, railroad stations, and rolling hills of grass.

Northeast Oklahoma countryside today is green and beautiful…not like it was in Woody’s Dust Bowl of 1930-1940.

And everything else in Oklahoma is different too. If you have never been, you would be hard pressed to find two cities so close and so fun for a weekend visit as OKC and Tulsa.

Find out more www.visitokc.com/