The Ghost of Tom Joad Video Response

The Ghost of Tom Joad Video Response The beauty of the written word is that everyone can experience and interpret it in a different way with some help from writer and their purpose behind the piece. The beauty of songs is that people are free to express those individual interpretations in ways that allow them to use their voices and instruments. The beauty of video is that the makers can put these two things together and then add images and audio-texts to enhance the meaning of the song for viewers. The song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” has brought about multiple YouTube videos for this exact reason. In the video The Ghost of Toam Joad by Harveywetdog, the use of imagery definitely gave me a better sense of what this song is referencing. Nearly all of the pictures that slide across the screen were taken around the time of the Depression. Since that is the time period in which the character Tom Joad was living, this allowed me to understand the song and the lyrics in a more complete way. All the pictures of families and children frequently on the road and having nowhere to go really spoke to me about the world we live in today. It is a bit easier to feel for these people and the cause the song represents when you have a face to stick to it. It somehow makes their struggles seem more real. Harveywetdog gave me numerous faces to connect with and this only evoked more emotion in me because it causes me to really think about all of the people out there who simply want to live their lives, but are being held back due to the limits circumstance and money and society put on them. Pictures from the film The Grapes of Wrath that show Tom Joad with a quote printed on the screen also show up throughout the pictures whenever the singers say something about waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad, and they made it seem like he was there at the campfire light and was urging them to go on. I also found it very effective that Harveywetdog used actual clips of sound from the movie