Chris Knight
Broken Plow



Capo 5


 Am
Load up the old Dodge truck
       F
We’ll eave what we can’t sell
 Am                                 F
Nobody needs a sharecropper’s tools or a dust filled well
Am
Take you one last look around
     F
And shed you one last tear
         Am
For the broken plow, the broken dreams
         F                  Am
And the life we’re leaving here


Pull the lines down tight
The kids can ride on top of the load
In the cool of the night
They can crawl underneath the tarp
To stay out of the cold
Eleven hundred miles of mountain and sand
We’ll cross ‘em tired and torn
If this beat up truck can carry us
Far enough away from the storm

       F            C 
We’re going to California
         G
There’s work there for a man
      F                C
Too proud to beg for charity
     G               F
Too poor to make a stand
                               G
Pray it’s just the land we’re losing
        C                   F
Not my life’s blood that I leave
        Am
On the handles of that broken plow
      F               Am
That haunts me in my dreams


A man at a roadside station
Don’t like dealing with my kind
He’d beat me out of my last dollar
And never look me in the eye
I heard ‘em call us Okies
Hell I don’t know what that means
But something tells me the promised land
Ain’t as promising as it seems


We’re going to California...


F Am

This restless road is full of strangers
They ain’t no stranger than I 
Hardened faces damn the dust and curse the wind
That drove us from this life and home
We’ll never know again

We’re going to California...