Dust Bowl migrants
- Frank and Myra Pipkin
- UNITED STATES
Frank and Myra Pipkin (birth and death dates unknown), Dust Bowl migrants
Very little is known about Frank and Myra Pipkin, a married couple who came to live in California in the waning years of the Great Depression. The Pipkins were much like the thousands of other migrants who moved from the Dust Bowl states of Oklahoma and Arkansas in the 1930s and who have remained anonymous in the histories of the era.
The Pipkins, however, are different in one key regard. Folklorists Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin recorded Myra Pipkin telling her migration story and singing a few folk ballads at the Shafter Migratory Labor Camp in Central California.
As Myra Pipkin tells in the brief interview included here, she journeyed with her family from Arkansas to Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1898. After years of hard work and struggling to make ends meet, however, she moved with her husband to California. Although life remained difficult in California, she claimed that she had no intention of returning to Oklahoma because of the higher wages in California.
The songs she sang for Todd and Sonkin demonstrate how the culture of the Southern Plains was brought to California in the years before the Second World War.